Jennifer

Dear Family,
Our big excitement was Finn's First Birthday Party! Angela and Ammon did a fine job in making his big day quite an event. It was a monkey theme -- monkey cupcakes, monkey pool with small plastic balls, and little stuffed monkeys and monkey sippy cups as party favors. For refreshments (in addition to food that you need to have teeth) there were cheerios, bananas, mumba crackers -- all those munchies that one year olds love -- along with one-year old music in the background like "Itsy Bitsy Spider," "Milk in the morning, milk at night..." Anyway, it was geared to one year old kids and was very cute. Incidentally, Finn was the only boy. There were about five girls. Kind of reminded me of when Ammon was in college.

While we were in Seattle for Finn's birthday I put together a pirate ship costume for Finn's stroller. It was fun and kept me busy. So on Halloween, Finn (as a pirate) had a ship to ride around in.

I had my birthday (Halloween) off work and Steve and I went to Muir Woods. It was lightly sprinkling...nice walk in the woods. Then we went to Stinson Beach -- by then it was raining really hard and after five minutes on the beach we decided we were wet enough. The rain lifted for the Trick-or-Treators. We had about 100 kids. Very cute costumes.

The poor economy has affected my workplace -- five people were laid off and a few people cut back their hours. If the firm didn't do something, there's a possibility of it closing by the end of the year. We hope that won't happen. For now I'm very happy and thankful to have a job.

Lots of excitement with the election! Proud to be an American and looking forward to change with new President-elect Obama.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Love, Jennifer & Steve