A Busy Fall

We have been pretty busy around here these last few months!
On September 1st, its the opening day of dove season, AKA Christmas to the Walker boys.

 Tate played Flag Football again this season and really enjoyed it. Our district has a team for each school so everyone on his team were 2nd and 3rd graders from Andersen.

 Brotherly love. Grant played YMCA soccer and most of his games coincided with Tate's flag football, but here was one game that Grant got to see. He was proud of his brother.

 David coached Grant's team again this Fall and had a great time. You can see junior coach Tate in the back, he tried to go to as as many games and all practices as he could to help out.

 Pep talk from the coach after the game..... they were probably just asking who brought the snack.

 If you drove into our neighborhood this Fall you would see these signs all over.

 In October, our school had Fall Break, so I tagged along on a work trip with David to San Francisco and the wine country for a few days while the boys went to Weatherford.

So beautiful!

 This was at our first tasting in Napa, Pine Ridge. It was my favorite. We chatted with the couple behind David for a long time. They were from New Jersey and it was their first time to California. The week after this Hurricane Sandy hit and I have wondered about them ever since!

 Champagne tasting at Gloria Ferrer vineyards.....YUM!

 Kim gave us the idea to get a picnic so when we were in Sonoma we went to a small grocery store and got some yummy things to eat and drink. Thanks for the idea, Kim!

 We drove into San Francisco our last day and it was overcast and rainy but still beautiful!

 Halloween 2012: the Vampire and the WHITE ninja. Our church has a Fall Festival so we went to that and the kids had a great time.

 Lastly, I have been substituting at the boys school alot this year. One day I got to sub in Grant's class so I grabbed a quick picture of him. According to the substiute rules, this is grounds for termination, but I'm pretty sure no one reported me and it was my child after all! He was so happy to have me in his class but his teacher sure has her hands full this year. I can't believe I used to do that every day!

First Day of School

On August, 20th we started the first day of Third Grade and Kindergarten!  We have all been excited about this for quite some time! It is a bittersweet year for us beginning this new chapter of our lives having both boys in school. I was so hoping it would be better than Tate's first day of Kindergarten (absolutely awful) and it was! The nosy mom in me signed up to help with some PTA stuff on the first day of school just so I could be in the building if we had a runner in the Kindergarten wing. Thankfully, that was not the case and he went in, with some hesitation, but not too much. Here he is the morning of wearing a smile and his cars PJ's.

  The big cool third grader happily let me take his picture out front before we got in the car. The little one got cold feet for a few minutes and said he didn't want to go to school with Tate anymore and he would just stay home with me. We talked about it and he decided he would go but did NOT want his picture taken.

Here he is outside of the school, I snuck a picture. Looks nervous, doesn't he?

We made it in and he found his name tag. He looks bored in this pic, just a little nervous still...........

I finally got a smile when his cute, YOUNG, teacher greeted him.

I "happened" to walk by the cafeteria when his class was at lunch and sat with him for a few minutes. He was much happier and said he was having fun!

Oh yeah, and Tate did great too. Here he is with his cute, YOUNG, teacher Mrs Crawford.

And while walking the halls at meet the teacher we discovered that Tate made the wall art! You can see how excited he is about it.

Tate is 9!

Monday, August 20th, was Tate's 9th birthday. We took some friends to LaserQuest to play a couple of games, eat pizza, and have fun!

Tate on his birthday (also the first day of 3rd grade)

The Field and Stream Cake

Eating pizza

The party....bad picture but best I could get of 7 wild boys!

Actual birthday morning opening some presents that Nana sent

Colorado

We went to Colorado the week of the 4th. We left Denver to head up to the mountains for the week only to realize we didn't have a key to the condo! It belongs to David's uncles family so he had someone meet him an hour away to give him the key. This is most of the family standing outside wondering "how could we get in without a key?"

We got in and the kids wanted to go fishing.

Ai Pei had never fished before and she caught the first one!  She wanted to go back every day .

 We had heard about a 5K the family could run do in WinterPark. We all got excited, especially Tate, he really wanted the tshirt. We later found out we were mistaken and it was actually WinterPark Florida! So, we got creative and decided to have our own 5K. We called it the First Annual Dilling 5K and Fun Run.

Team TCU
Matt, Emily, Ella, and Lily

Team Texas
Nana and Tate

Team CU
David's cousin Dierdra and her boyfriend Chad, AKA Grant's new best friend

Team White
David's Aunt Judy and Tony, cousins Brett and Ai Pei

Team Blue
Papo Ron, Grant, Julie and David
( we all happened to be in blue, no real meaning behind blue)

The Starting line.....Tate is serious.

After a few yards Ella wanted me to hold her hand and walk with her . We had time to stop and take a picture. We weren't really competing, just looking at the gorgeous houses on the streets around the condo.

After Brett won the race we had a waterballoon tossing contest. My
Mother in law and I were the champions of each game!

David won the watermelon contest

One night we were there David, Tate and I went on a very long hike to a river. It was beautiful !

On Tuesday morning everyone, except me, went horse back riding at the YMCA of the Rockies.

I did go fly fishing with David one day. Not my sport but he liked having me there and I didn't fall down like someone did.
I like staying dry:)

On our way home we stopped in the village of WinterPark. We rode a gondola and Tate and David rode the Alpine Slide down the mountain. Tate loved it!

Getting off the Slide. Tate said next time we come he wants to ride it all day long!