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Wednesday, January 26, 2011

November 2010

We went trick-or-treating on the 30th since Halloween fell on a Sunday this year and that is what our community does. Since we went to the parents' on the 31st, we decided to celebrate Faith's birthday a day early.

At my mom & dad's
(I love that Tony is attacking Joy with a big bear hug in this photo! He usually attacks everyone, including my mom, with bum pinching :)
 

Grandma Tesch
Grandma Quinn

Faith decroated her own cake! I love the Littlest Pet Shop Party theme even though Tammy and I tried to get her to pick "Twilight" instead.


At Tony's mom & dad's.

we played some dominoes after gifts and cake

The next day, Faith wore her favorite new outfit to school.

This is one of the 3 pumpkins we got out of our garden. The first one rotted through before it was ready to pick, and the other two looked like this: two-toned with a regular side and a shiny side, and the flower end close to the stem end and not on opposite sides. Also, when we cut them open they smelled like cucumber. Weird!

Here's Faith's book report diorama on Flame: The Desert Pony (The fifth book in the Magic Pony Carousel series). She did such a great job!

And Buddy's picture of a slug :)

Inspired by an activity at the farmer's market, we bought different kinds of apples that we weren't as familliar with and had a taste test. We especially loved the HoneyCrisp and Jazz apples.

Home Depot project for November--firehouse piggy banks.

I took down our Halloween stuff and had this witch (given to us by Lana) sitting in the family room. All of a sudden, Christian passionately grabs her, says (in a particularly low and seductive voice) "You a evil, old witch and I wuv evil people!" and starts making out with it!! I love how he considers himself a comedian and is always playing for laughs :D

Christian got this costume for 75% off and wore it for preschool on the 10th. I guess he thought it was appropriate attire for our Veteran's Day flag march. (????)

Later that day we went to meet with Faith's teachers for Student/Educator/Parent conference and took some pics while waiting our turn out in the hall.

Buddy's striking a karate pose because it goes with his "bar-ka-wee (sparkly) dragon shirt.

Here is some artwork Faith got to bring home:
a pasta skeleton complete with curly hair and bow
a darling leaf puppy

For "Fun Friday" on the 19th, I taught about turkeys. We talked about scientific classification, labled body parts, and learned fun facts. We played "Turkey Term Pictionary" and made handprint turkeys. Afterward, Buddy and I stayed for lunch and lunch recess.

Because I'm on their mailing list, we got invited to Santa breakfast at the Newgate Mall on the 20th. We got blueberry cream cheese crepes, Chick-fil-A nuggets, gogurt, granola bar, apple and yucky punch drinks for free!

We got to see a magician perform, Santa arrive at the mall and ride the train to his display, and meet Rudolph!

Later that morning--Lowe's project: snowman gift card holder.

The day before Thanksgiving Tony had surgery to fix an umbilical hernia. The kids were very good at the hospital for the first two and a half hours before Tammy picked them up as a surprise. Everything went well and Tony was released just a half hour after that. He was sore for about a week, but healed up fairly quickly. He was even able to attend the family dinners the next day.

We enjoyed two Thanksgiving dinners, as usual. Here are my grandparents and neices Lily and Sierra.

My mom made cute Oreo and candy turkeys for the grandkids.

As usual, I got caught up in the awesome feasts and forgot to get many pictures. None of Buddy, or anyone at Tony's parents'!

My mom invited us for the third annual Night of the Nutcracker and it was amazing as always!

She gifted the girls with ornaments of the Nutcracker, himself, wielding a sword and one of Uncle Drosselmeyer. Faith always looks forward to the ballet soooo much!

On the 27th we went to the Christmas Nativity Celebration at the Kaysville Tabernacle. We loved looking at the gorgeous nativities from around the world, doing a searching game to find specific pieces, and listening to the live music.


The kids even drew pictures to be hung in a nearby nursing home (except Buddy couldn't let his go and it came home with us. He's still working on the "it's better to give than to receive" part of Christmas).

Friday, January 21, 2011

Halloween and such 2010

My youngest sister throws an awesome Halloween party every year and this is the creepy treat we brought: meringue bones. This is the recipe I used, but I thought I could grease the pan instead of use parchment paper as the recipe suggests. Note--parchment paper is NOT optional! (most of my meringue ended up just broken pieces and not the bones I originally piped out using a ziploc bag with the corner cut off)

My darling children

Joy and Jordan

their daughter Lily (I don't know why I don't have a picture of Sierra, but they had matching costumes)


Since I didn't wear a costume I got "punished" with this impromptu mummy getup

My brother, Eric, with his girlfriend, Ashley

My favorite costumes of Joy & Jordan's friends'--she had her ultrasound photo stuck to her stomach that you could see through the oven door and the number of days left to bake on the timer up top. The husband's apron says "bun maker"

A shot of Joy's kitchen with Jordan's brother Nate at the back

Lots of other people were there with their kids, but I don't know many of their friends, so I didn't get pictures of them :)  For dinner they did a crepe bar and then a table of Halloween themed potluck items. The delicious fillings for the mummy wraps (crepes) had cute labels such as (Scooby Doo) van-illa pudding, BAT-nana pudding,  O+  Oh, positive it's only strawberry sauce, hot cauldron o' fudge, etc.

Eric, who was Neo from the Matrix, even played the "pin the treasure chest on the pirate map" with the kids! It was lots of fun and the few of us who stayed late had a blast playing "Mafia" and watching an episode of "Supernatural."

I love that with Christian's coloring he gets such darling, rosy cheeks when it's chilly. (Wait, did I say coloring? I meant complete and utter lack of coloring :)

It started getting below freezing at night, so we thought we'd better salvage what we could that was left in our garden. We sure had fun with it!

The next three pictures are more of Buddy's photography handiwork:

(this one came out overexposed and with red eyes, but very cool for a witch)

On the 28th we went to a Halloween carnival at Faith's school.

I ran a game where the kids would try to toss a witch's hat onto a cone. It was lots of fun there were a ton of games (I think at least 15!). I loved how affordable it was--for $1 you could get a slice of pizza, a cookie, and a cup of water and the games were free! How they worked it is that every child got a wristband and each time they won a prize at a game they got an "X" on it. After three X's, they could still play the games, but they couldn't win any more prizes. Such a fun night!

On the 29th we had Ann & kids over to play and we made vampire suckers instead of the traditional ghosts. We just used some red tissue paper, black felt, silver twist ties, google eyes, and paper triangle fangs.


(Faith and Ella got fancy and added hair so theirs were vampiresses)



That night we had trunk-or-treating and homemade soup at the church.


On our way home, we passed by where a family sells the pumpkins they grow in their garden and noticed that they were clearancing out what was left for $2 each. We hadn't gotten any yet (with the exception of the puking pumpkin--see previous post below) so we got five big ones for ten bucks! We stayed up late scooping them out and making delicious toasted seeds.



Tony's maternal grandfather had passed away on the Sunday prior and we attended his funeral on the 30th. I need to get pictures from Tammy, so I'll do a separate post on that.

Halloween evening was pretty rainy.  We got ready,

then waited for sunset. In the meantime we got this beautiful double rainbow!

It was kinda cold and we needed our umbrellas, but we trekked around our neighborhood and the nearby patio homes and the kids loaded up on candy.

We trick-or-treated at my mom & dad's and got full sized candy bars!

We stopped by their neighbor's to see their awesome display with tons of creepy manequins. How would you like to store those in your basement? I think I'll pass.

Christian wouldn't even turn his back on those scary guys for the picture above. He started crying because he wanted a picture, too, so I had him stand farther away and just quickly pivot toward me for this shot.

We then headed over to Tony's parents' and met up with Tina & Zach. No chili this year because of all of Lana's time going to funeral prep :(

Check out that haul!