Holiday Festivities

Ok, time to play catch up. Let's start with Thanksgiving, 2009. We had a pretty calm one compared to most years. With Paul gone, we just felt like staying home and stuff. My parents and Kevin came over. So it was nice but pretty quiet. Kevin brought over a cool remot-control contraption he had made and we had fun playing with that. A highlight of the day was of course the tradition of making our gingerbread houses that evening.

They made some pretty fine houses. It was a fun weekend.Jack and Em had a sleep over with Jeremy and Lucy had one with Zoe and Caitlin and then the Martins visited from Las Vegas so it was a fun weekend.

Early December; time to get excited for Christmas. A classic, visiting Temple Square to see the lights. We met up with Grandma and Silvi, Wendy and Wil, Jaci and Tanner. It was lovely as always and we went to Crown Burger after. YUM!

Halloween 2009

Happy Halloween! It is the spookiest night of the year!

Two scary vampires.

Obi wan is ready for action. Maybe he will protect us from the many vampires lurking in our neighborhood tonight!

It is called candy corn pizza. Get it? Kind of hard to tell in the picture. It did look like candy corn. I thought it was a cute idea plus the kids love pizza, so how could we go wrong? Yummy dinner to start the halloween festivities.

Carving pumpkins-- October 09

Carving pumpkins is one of our favorite fall activites. The exciting thing this year was that we were carving pumpkins that we grew ourselves. We found out that fresh pumpkins are much easier to carve too! They turned out great. We also put on the great halloween music Paul sent the kids and danced while carving. Note: we don't recommend dancing with sharp knives in your hands of course, but it sure was fun!

Jack fondly named his little pumpkin "peanut" .

I think he was all of our favorites.

Yikes, I just noticed a ghost behind the blinds... spooky huh? Who could it be?

Our favorite army man

Since our favorite soldier has not been able to put these up himself (the internet isn't so reliable in the middle of a war I guess) we chose a few of our favorites that he has sent us and hope to be getting more soon. This last one is the place where he calls home for the next year. We are so proud of him and are thankful for his sacrifice. While we sleep in our comfy beds, he has given up many of life's modern conveniences. He is tougher than us! We love you Dad!

Family photos are done!!!

We took these pictures in August. We wanted to get a great family photo before Paul left for Afghanistan. We are so excited that they are finally ready. And we love them. Come visit us to see the real, big ones in the house!

Halloween Goodies

The girls and I found these cute halloween cupcake ideas and decided to try them out. They turned out pretty darn cute, we must admit. And it was lots of fun too... what a bonus!

Coloring the frosting was my job, and the kids helped do the rest.

The best part... sampling the final project to make sure we did it all right.

OK, so this has nothing to do with halloween cupcakes, but while we were decorating the treats, I was also trying to get my Noah to finish his dinner. Apparently he wasn't that hungry since his dinner roll became a giant monster that engulfed Obi-wan Kenobi. All that's left are his feet. Poor Obi-wan. I had to take a picture of Noah's silliness/ cleverness.

Final harvest has arrived

Look at those beauties! They are almost to beautiful to cut off the vine.

We practised the day before... Noah wanted a picture of himself pretending to pick the pumpkin... notice the look on his face as he pretends to be pulling the pumpkin really hard!

The big day finally arrived and many of the neighbor friends came to participate. Grandpa provided the donuts and chocolate milk. Then everyone scouted out which one they wanted.

Noah liked rolling his pumpkin so much that he rolled it all the way to the car.

Time to pose with their treasures

After pumpkin picking, playground playing, and such various fun, the ladies found the carrot patch and found some gi-normous ones to take home too. It was a really fun event and we have decided that all that gardening work all spring and summer was so very worth it!!