. . .from the past week or two:

This is the last rose to bloom on one of the rosebushes in our front yard. I caught this image before fall paid us a visit for a few hours this week. And now winter seems to have swooped in already, and all of its petals have fallen. The fact that we got roses at all this year was pretty special. The plants had been seriously neglected while we remodeled our house last fall, and when I finally got around to pruning them and cleaning out the weeds in the spring, I wasn’t sure they’d bounce back.

When Kerrick’s third tooth (but first top front one) came out two weeks ago, I declared him our official jack-o-lantern for the season. He looked a little concerned when I hinted that we might sit him on the front porch with a flashlight in his mouth to greet the neighborhood trick-or-treaters.

We made about 10 of these little ghosts out of recycled plastic bags two years ago, and it’s been fun to bring them out again this year and watch them dangling from the trees in our front yard, dancing in the, er, autumn breeze.

Our newest recycling project involved turning old spice jars into bug-catching containers. The snap on lids with built-in air holes help make them the perfect tool for capturing and examining a spider or other specimen. Kellen even “sold” a few of these at the “store” he operates with a friend at his school-away-from-home program once a week. (They have a class economy set up, and they earn class money—not the real thing!—by working various jobs.)