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Thursday, October 29, 2009

first part of October

On September 30th I decided that it was officially fall, or at least very fallish. That meant it's time to break out the soup recipes!! (or in this case, the Bear Creek soup packet) I also did fresh rolls (not homemade though, just dough from Bowman's bakery). Christian has a new ambition to make crazy faces in as many of my pictures as he can. Good on 'im that he has goals so young.

The morning of October 1st, Christian found a slug to play with. A few days later, after a rainstorm, he collected up a slew of them and put them into a tupperware container with a few plants to keep as pets. I had a ton of errands that day and Buddy insisted on bringing them with. Every time a passerby or cashier asked what he had there, he proudly answered, "Swugs."
Faith went to her friend Kelsie's birthday party at the DATC and ended up with a very beautiful, curly hairdo. She also got her nails painted! What a fun girlie party.
Christian has been doing so-so with his potty training. I think it's hilarious that every time he pees in the potty, he calls to the family, "Come here and see my yay-yo (yellow)!"

On October 3rd we went to J & J Nursery for a free hayride and pumpkin picking. Faith got an invite to it from school, and all you had to do was bring canned items for the Utah Food Bank.

Faith made sure she found the perfect one,

and Christian changed his mind about which was the perfect one about a hundred times.

My dad gave us his old, old laptop so that the kids could both be on the computer at the same time and Faith has been having fun with it. She likes to set up her little office in the family room or the kitchen and play Webkinz or look up ads for ZhuZhu pets.

Faithy painted this at school with watercolors and was so excited that many of her classmates oohed and ahed over it. It is gorgeous!

I was putting sticky dots on some googly eyes to get them ready for a preschool project on the morning of the 6th and Buddy asked if he could play with a set. He went right to work giving our produce some personality.


I read this book called "The Biggest Bed in the World" to my preschool kids for B week a few weeks ago. It's so cute! My favorite part is this page that just says that the mom has another baby, but it shows the baby breastfeeding. Nothing is mentioned in the text about it, it's just a picture of what happens when a tiny newborn joins the family. LOVE IT!

Faith made us this cool jack-o-lantern decoration . . .
boo!

Christian took this picture of Crumpet the other day, right after he woke her from a nap. Love the hair! I definately feel (and look) like this some days!!
Some Thursdays Christian and I return to school to have lunch with Faith after volunteering for her class in the morning. Faith loves to show me how good she is getting on the monkey bars

and Christian has a ball on the playground, too.

Faith wrapped up this soccer season by being goalie twice! She was too frightened to do that last year. She is doing so much better at not being afraid of the ball and all the crazy kicking.

Here was their Lowe's craft on the 10th, a ball toss game.

That afternoon, I got busy making cupcakes for the cake walk at our ward "harvest" party. They usually go all out on a "Halloween" party, but they couldn't get the building any later in October, so they went with more of a harvest/fall theme this year. I tried a fancy new frosting, chocolate mousse buttercream (recipe here). I didn't see that it called for unsalted butter, so after I tasted mine and it was too buttery tasting, I added some powdered sugar to it and it came out quite delicious. I'm not a huge fan of chocolate, so it wasn't my favorite ever, but everyone who tried it gave it rave reviews. Still, if I make it again, I'll probably still use salted butter, but lessen the amount to 3 or 4 sticks (!!!!). Oh! Another thing! This recipe makes a TON, so halve or quarter it. I heavily frosted 48 cupcakes with my batch and still had some left over. These had a peanut butter filling in them,

and I also made some with a marshmallow creme filling. This picture shows my inspiration (because I somehow forgot to get a pic), but mine just had the graham cracker crumbs over the chocolate mousse buttercream frosting and two of the toasted mini marshmallow on a pretzel stick decorations on the top. They were some of the first chosen by the winning cakewalk-ers! (you can check out the directions for this one here)

Tony was sick and missed out, but the kids and I had a blast!

They had all the games that they usually do, minus the spook alley.

Both kids ended up with plates of cupcakes--Christian's had Reeses mini peanut butter cup/pretzel/Red Hot spiders
and Faiths were brownies in cupcake wrappers with gum strip mummy wraps and M&M eyes.
Here's Buddy's haul-
and they had square dancing with a caller.
Check out my video of the kids doing the chicken dance:
The next day when we walked into Sacrament meeting a few minutes late and had to sit quite far back in the gym, Christian looked around and screamed, "Where that fishing booth, aaa-aaahh-hhhhh-hhhhh!!!!!" Poor little guy, he thought they finally figured out how to make church awesome ;)

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

last half of September

This was taken Sep. 19th. Christian continues to love cooking with me and especially loves cracking eggs. He actually does pretty well with them, I was making over-easy eggs that day and he didn't even break the yolks!


Earlier that day, Buddy had gotten ahold of a bottle of red fingernail polish and I didn't find out until he showed me his beautious manicure. I immediately searched for the inevitable mess of spilled polish that would be impossible to clean up, but found that he had been very careful. The only spills were on his shirt! It wasn't until the next day that I noticed a new piece of artwork on the wall of our family room. It looked like a piece of paper painted with red watercolor because the hue was not super bright. What I found when I went to remove it, however, was that it was painted with this same polish and then applied to the wall paint side down. I'll have to get around to repainting that wall soon >:-[

Faith is really into making smoothies lately. Of course, our version is more of a slush/shake than an actual smoothie . . .

On the 20th we had Tony's family over for the Pittsburgh/Chicago football game since many of them are Bears fans and Tony (of course) loves the Steelers. Those of us not interested in the event played games instead.

Bears won, so Tony wasn't thrilled, but he still enjoyed having people to watch the game and exchange trash talk with.

Christian is obsessed with board games. We play tons of them while Faith is in school to keep the little guy from missing his sister too much. Here he just won "Pretty Pretty Princess: Cinderella Special Edition".

Because Christian's molars have super deep grooves, we knew he would need to get those teeth filled soon. At this six month check-up, the dentist said that they are starting to get cavities so Buddy got six teeth done in two days! Luckily, he takes after his sister and LOVES the dentist. He didn't flinch once and was even excited to go back in the second day. What planet are these kids from????

On the 24th, we went to Joy's for Sierra's M week activity. First, they made treats. Christian got to add the margerine, then others got to put in the marshmallows and Joy microwaved it. Then they mixed in the cereal and molded it with their hands, making a mess in the process :)

Here is the mask that Buddy decorated.

Next, the kids got ready with dress-up clothes for the masquerade. Christian tried all the boy stuff they had (which isn't much since she has two daughters) and kept switching out pieces the rest of the afternoon.

Here they are marching into the family room to "Masquerade" from Phantom of the Opera. What a fun play day!

Fire truck project from Lowe's on the 26th.

That day we also got Christian a big boy bedroom set. Unfortunately, he still rarely sleeps in his room, so I've kept the toddler bed up in mine.

Pretty soon I'll need to find a comforter for him and redecorate his room. For now, Noah's arc will have to do.

On September 28th we went to Black Island Farms for the first of two visits this year. My mom and dad treated and took all the grandkids. I got there the earliest and Faith and Christian discovered that when you spend an hour climbing up difficult haystack rope ladders on an overly warm day you nearly get heatstroke :)


The train was a huge hit again this year.


Buddy and I only braved (read: endured) the kiddie corn maze, but Faith did one of the bigger ones with Brad, Brendon & Celeste later in the evening. I'm not sure which side they did, Edward's face or Jacob's.
We watched the pig races and Faith got picked to root for the one marked with black!
The blue one won so she didn't win a piggy nose, but she got a spider ring as a booby prize.
They loved doing the rubber duckie races with their cousins.


It was hard to get Buddy out of the corn box again. A week later when he wore this jacket again, he discovered that he'd stashed a handful of the dried corn in the pocket.
We had such a blast and I have to thank my mom and dad again for taking us!