Halloween Party

We got invited to a cute little-kid Halloween Party yesterday. The boys loved that they got to get their costumes on, we decorated cupcakes, played some fun halloween games and of course destroyed Olya's house! I loved her hand and eyeball jellos in the punch bowl- cute idea! Should have taken more pictures, but we had a lot of fun!

Bradley's Joyschool Halloween Party

Here they are doing their little parade for the moms.

And Brad got to "roar" for everyone :) He was so cute when he was getting ready to go- he said, "My teacher going be weewy scared with my scary lion costume!" He's so fun.

I absolutely love watching my kids and how they act with other kids, and in this kind of setting (teacher/parent/student) it's really interesting to me for some reason. Bradley is such a good little boy.

Wednesday was Brad's little Halloween Party at Joyschool. He had been pretty excited for this and it was definitely all he could have hoped for and more. He got to wear his lion costume which is a huge plus. They did "a lot of fun stuff" during Joyschool- including making a pumpkin out of a witch story, little pumpkin puppets to go with a song, they made "eyeballs" with a powedered sugar donut, lifesaver, and red hot with red gel frosting as "the red parts" (they were way cute- I'm gonna have to copy that for next year), sang lots of songs, Brad's pretty vague on the discription of what he did, but anyway- he had fun. It was pretty fun to see Brad experience this kind of Halloween. He sure loved it.

Kelly's Big "K" Owie

Tuesday night at Scouts, Kelly was running around the gym with the other kids (even though they know they're not supposed to!!!) and caught her heel under the acordian doors. It was bleeding like crazy and is actually a pretty deep cut. We decided to show it to Daddy when he got home and to cheer Kelly up he pointed out that it looked just like a Big K! (which it really does-upsidedown) so of course I took a picture of it :) and now you get to see it on my blog :) Poor little Kelz!

Carving Pumpkins

We finally did our pumpkin carving on Monday. We let everyone pick out their own pumpkin this year- it was SO MUCH FUN!!

Kelly drew her design and scooped out the guts all by herself. Her little picture on her "strawberry" pumpkin was so cute! If only I could have carved out every single detail- it was pretty intricate.

Charity did her design and scooping as well. Charity was really good at cleaning hers out this year. Normally she gets too grossed out.

Bradley let Daddy draw his face- he wanted a scary one, but he did most of the scooping (this is the first year that my kids have done enough on their own to even speak of :))

I really felt like everyone had so much fun it went really well.

I think Luke really enjoyed watching everyone and pretty much overseeing the whole thing. He didn't really want to stick his hand in the pumpkin, but he was happy watching Daddy draw the face, and he loved helping mommy carve.

Noah did his best at eating his fishy crackers :) He was such a good boy the whole time, just sat back and watched. He really is just content with life and how things are. Very pleasant little boy.

Lukey helped entertain Noah a lot too.

And there ya have it- 5 very unique, little works of art, pumpkins :)

Random Pictures

The Maynes Family Halloween Party

I'm really embarrassed to say that I haven't a single picture of the Halloween Party. I'm a disgrace to bloggers around the world, I know. But I thought, instead of pictures, maybe I could treat you to some of the yummy recipes I used for our fondue instead.
Nate wanted to have an 80's night. So we asked everyone to dress up (knowing that no one really would need to dress up- HA! Totally kidding-- we knew that Nancy would be the one to get the most into it though :) Thanks Nance!). Then we had a night of Fondue (idea taken from the Manwaring's family Christmas Party that they so graciously took us to when we were stuck in Alaska for a week- that family is incredible. We loved the fondue idea and had been wanting to copy it for some time now) Nate's family has enough people so we were able to ask each family to bring a different ingredient that would be good with chocolate, cheese, caramel and oil fondues. I think everyone was skeptical about the idea (just because it was different I think), but anyway- I thought it all went really well!! I was so proud of my chocolate and caramel. And after Paulette complimented my cheese I was relieved- I wasn't sure it was going to work. But yeah, so then we got everyone in a big circle for the candy game, he had like 2 other games that we never even got to because the one was such a big hit with everyone. But it was just a really fun night with the Maynes family- we were glad that so many came ALL THE WAY out to our house.
So anyway here are my recipes:

Cheese Fondue:
1 1/2 cups milk
6 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
2 T mustard
Put all ingredients in a pot and heat on low heat until melted and smooth. Pour into fodue pot (or crock pot). Serve with bread, sausages, vegetables, etc.
Mine looked like it was going to be grainy- but the texture seemed fine as long as I stirred it up frequently.

Chocolate Fondue:
4 bags of milk chocolate chips
about 1 cup of heavy whipping cream (just use 1/2 and add as needed)
Melt chocolate in crock pot (or microwave or fondue pot), add cream when the chocolate is fully melted. Keep stirring this as well. We served ours with strawberries, bananas, pineapple, angel food cake, marshmellows and cinnamon bears. mmmmmmm

Caramel Fondue:
1 can evaporated milk
2 bags caramels
1 Tbsp vanilla
Melt caramels with evaporated milk on low heat. Add vanilla. Pour into fondue pot (or crock pot) and stir often. I think the apples were really good in the caramel, but most of the things for the chocolate tasted good with the caramel too.

Then for the oil we were just going to heat the oil and then put it in a crock pot, but we didn't have enough crock pots so we just did it in our fryer (cheaters)- turned out great though. We dipped marinated beef chunks and chicken chunks in ours, but the recipe suggested fish and shrimp too- have to try that sometime.

So anyway- we had a good time. Hopefully I can steal some of Grandma Ruthie's pictures from the evening.

The JAZZ Game!!

Noah just loved the game! He kept clapping and making his cute little noises the whole time. He only got a little restless toward the end and I think that's because he wanted some Mommy juice. But it was fun to have him (and his cute double chin) with us.

Okay so I got some Jazz tickets from Brett like 2 weeks ago. My plan was to surprise Nate with them (he likes surprises, and he loves the Jazz). So for 2 weeks I had to keep my big mouth shut about these tickets. And it wasn't easy!!! Especially when Nate had the great idea to get free tickets to Thursday night's game!!! I totally had to trick him into not getting them so that we could use the ones I got. It's really hard for me to lie to Nate. But so anyway.

Thursday afternoon I took the kids over to Jared and Paulette's (thanks again guys for watching them on the forced Late Over :)jk.) when I got back Nate was already home and I hadn't even made our on-the-road dinners yet, so on the spot I thought of "the kids are gone, we're going on a date, and since we don't have a ton of money, we're just going to go on a picnic". So we came inside, made the sandwiches, got everything for a picnic, and took off. Nate was so cute to ask me which park we were going to (good job!) and I told him that I knew of a park just past Smith's (I was kind of thinking of a few on the way to the freeway, but then it hit me that if we got on the freeway any later we would hit traffic), so I convinced him to get on the freeway, and head North. The great thing about Nate is that he is so trusting! He never once questions why we can afford to drive down to Taylorsville (taht's where we ended up picnicking) but not just grab something to eat close to home. Yeah, so since we were meeting Meg and Chris in Taylorsville I decided we would just have our picnic at the park where Nate almost proposed to me (LONG story). It was very sweet and very sentimental, and I love that Nate thought I just wanted to go there for that reason :) (not that I wouldn't, but I am a little too gas conscious to think of that). So we had a really nice picnic, just Nate, Noah and I, and then it was "time to go get the kids". So we got in the car and as we were driving I just let it all out! "Nate, I have something to tell you- we're actually going to go to a Jazz game tonight." He was SO CUTE when I told him!! I love Nate and his obsession with the Jazz- it's the funnest thing. Even for a preseason game!! Nate, I so love your surprisedness too- way to go on being surprised- that just makes it so fun to do things for you!! Thanks Babe! Yeah, so anyway- we met up with Meg and Chris (thanks again guys for coming with us- that was so much fun! I loved being able to do the girly chat-while-you-watch-the-game thing too, so thanks Meg). It was really a fun night. I love being able to spend good quality time with my Sweetie. I'm excited to have the season starting again- we missed the Jazz while we were in AK. I'm so glad they came back in the last half- and WON!! (that would have totally bummed me out had they lost :)) What a fun night!

The End of Ticklefest

Noah was about to die laughing so I grabbed my camera and as always his laughter kind of fizzled out :) But this clip still has some pretty cute little giggles :) I love his laugh.

I loved this one

I kinda stopped trying to get pictures of the girls' hairdos because they never look as good in the pictures, but this one was SO CUTE!! Should have gotten one from the front, but she looked adorable in this hairdo- it was way easy, and it stayed in!! Anyway- just wanted to remember it.

I know I'm obsessed with him :) But he's just so cute!

He was being SO FUNNY eating his yogurt. Doing all kinds of crazy things with his tongue and smacking his lips and stuff, it was HILARIOUS!! Bradley and I were totally cracking up. I tried to get a video, but as always, he stopped when we got the camera out. But since we had the camera out- we had to snap a few pictures :) He's just a nut sometimes.

Ahhh

Here's Noah snoozing away


and Lukey with his Skittles- the crazy little kid can hold candy in his sleep :)


And of course Kelly and Bradley- Brad's head totally fell off

Tuesday was a very interesting day. I think a lot of it had to do with the whole going back to school thing after the long weekend, not sure. But it was just a crazy day. I won't go into all the lame little details, I mostly just wanted to remember this moment.

We had just gone grocery shopping and then stopped at home to put the groceries in the house, and then went over to the school. I normally like to give myself 10 minutes or so to sit and read (in peace) while the kids are all strapped in (and sometimes watching a movie), but Tuesday was different. It was barely after 3:00 (Charity gets out at 3:30), and all four of my cute little kiddos were konked out and in dream land. I decided I had no choice but to milk this moment for all it was worth, so we drove over to the school, and waited a little longer than normal for Charity to come out :) SO NICE!!!!!!!!!!!! And they all slept the whole time :) AHHHHHH Sometimes it's just nice to have a minute to yourself.

The Last Day of Fall Break

We had such a nice relaxing Fall Break. We really didn't do a whole lot, but MAN it was a nice break! Yesterday the kids had to make a Juice Stand. Well, it started out as a FREE STICKER stand, but slowly evolved (Charity realized she wasn't going to make any money off FREE stickers). I'm not sure how the wobbly, soggy, old cardboard box held up the pitcher of juice, but it did. They had a few exciting moments where someone would drive by real slowly (possibly trying to read charity's sign: 20 cents Juice in blue pen on yellow lined paper), but no takers. I finally had pitty and gave Brad and Luke some change to buy some juice from them :) Charity was totally the manager, and was really good at overseeing the whole operation- I think she ended up with all the money in the end. Kelly was the one to beautify the stand- getting an old towel to lay over the top to make it look "prettier", and then she took over for Brad as the sign holder when he had his juice. Bradley was a very diligent sign holder, almost running out into the road a few times so that people would see it. And Luke was....well........good at drinking the juice :) He almost knocked the box over a few times, but by some miracle it never tipped over. I think if we didn't live on the edge of nowhere a juice stand might be more profitable, but just as a word of advice---next time you see a bunch of little kids huddled around a box and holding up a piece of paper- get out your change and make their day :)

Saturday

I love Noah's face in this picture :) He's so excited for the yummy food


Brad and Luke took off up the hill and rolled down a few times.


Noah likes pineapple.


Charity just follows Sariah around- it's so nice that they have each other to play with when we get together.

just playing with the photo editor- if you get sick of my lame editing then teach me how to do photoshop ;) HA! jk. sort of.

This picture is kind of an optical illusion...... is Kelly sitting or standing? and where is the person that belongs to the other set of legs??? hmmm??????

This was really sweet. Nate and I were looking around trying to count our kids (making sure they were all present- it was a BIG playground!), and this is how we found Kelly and Luke. Kelly was pushing him on the swing!! The cutest thing ever!! Without any help from mom and dad, she put him up on the swing and pushed him for a while. We couldn't help but sit there and bask in the moment.


Charity had a blast with Sariah and Ruby on the tire swing- I LOVED those swings when I was a kid.


Kelly loved holding baby Nathan


I just love these Father and his sons moments- better grow another arm, Nate, quick!!




Debe and I thought this would be a funny picture- looks like they're heckling the kids on the playground or something :)

Scott kept sending Jenna over with wood chips for her mom :) Very funny :)

Bradley did surprisingly well climbing the bar-dome-thingy (what are these called?). Only needed a little help!

Look, now they've got Charity doing it ;)

Lukey had fun on this teeter-totter thing- I thought that kid was going to send him flying.

On the way home from the park we stopped off at our old "Halloween House" that we used to drive past 50 times a year, back when we lived in T-ville. It's such a fun little display. The kids got a kick out of it.

On Saturday, we made our way up to Liberty Park for a BBQ and some fun with the Lignells. We had a good time eating the yummy food and playing with the Puppies (someone was trying to sell some puppies there so our kids and Debe all got some free entertainment out of that), then we walked over to the playground and had some more fun. I love it when our kids get together because they really do get along so well. Sariah is good at playing with Charity and making her feel cool enough to hang with an 8 year old :)