The Parrillo Family

This is Eloise's second Halloween and we marked the occasion with her second trip to Sonny Acres - our local pumpkin patch.   Here's a post that includes photos of our trip from last year.  Looking back, it is easy to see how much she's grown up in just one year. This year, Eloise was much more interested in stomping around, checking out the petting zoo and being helpful in selecting our pumpkin(s).  Seems like this has become a family tradition! There's a whole slideshow of photos of our visit you can see below.  (NOTE:  If you are reading this in your email and can not see the slideshow below, you should click here to view the slideshow on the web .)

Along with my folks, we took Eloise down to my Alma Mater (University of Illinois) for the Illini vs. OSU football game.  Once a year, the Athletic Department invites back all the former student-athletes and invite us to participate in the festivities - including the opportunity to spend some time down on the field.  For the first time, I brought Eloise down there - and - the best part:  we brought my Dad down there too! This wasn't Eloise's first visit to Memorial Stadium.   Here she was last October . Here she is from this weekend.

Eloise is starting to show off a little bit of her maternal instincts.  She's good at classifying groups of things into "Daddy" (the biggest of said things), "Momma" (the second biggest) and "Baby" (the smallest), regardless of what the objects/things are. Also, like most girls, she's taken an interest in her dolls.  Over the weekend, Grammy and Grandad Moran gave Eloise a new 'bath time baby' and she couldn't have been more excited.  We immediately filled up the little bathtub with water, went outside and Ellie began to scrub her up.  And...while Eloise loves her baths, you could tell that she was enjoying the fact that she wasn't the one getting the bath!

Our daughter loves hotdogs.  Yes.  Gasp!  Hotdogs.  And not (always) the organic/fancy kind.  In fact, if you ask her what she wants to eat for dinner on any given day, the answer will typically be "hotdog"! So, I was pretty excited to find time to take Nat and Ellie over to a hotdog stand called Gene & Jude's in River Grove, Illinois.  Gene & Jude's makes the "best hotdog" on various lists including Reader's Digest, a bunch of food and travel magazines and most recently was named "America's Best Hot Dog" by Rachel Ray . We ordered our dogs (Yes!  Even Nat ate a dog!) and then had to figure out how to eat them.  See...this is a true stand.  That means there aren't any tables.  Not even picnic tables outside.  Just a ledge that you can stand at and hunch over while you scarf your dog down.  We improvised and popped Ellie up on the counter where she could eat her dog and drink some of her Momma's root beer.  She cou...