some halloween stuff

Last week, Duncan really wanted to make a scarecrow. So I helped him find some pants and a shirt, and got him stuffing those with newspaper. I stapled the leg and hand holes shut to keep the paper in. Then we stapled the shirt to the pants. Next we stuffed a plastic grocery bag with newspaper and formed that into a head. Duncan drew a face, and we added a beany hat to finish him off.

Here's what it looked like.



Monday, when the boys got home from school, Anna dressed them in some costumes to wear while they did their homework. The costumes were in our Halloween storage boxes that we finally opened up that day. The hats didn't stay on long.

Last night we did our pumpkin carving. Here we are, all set up and ready to go. I thought there was a "middle" of our carving night, but nope, there's not.

Here are the finished jack-o-lanterns. The kids are standing behind the pumpkins they each designed. Again this year, we had them draw a face on the pumpkin and we helped them cut it out. It was a lot of fun.

This year, I made sure to save out most of the seeds, and toasted them. They're really good, but kind of hard/tricky to hull, so I'm not sure what I'll do with them other than put them in a bag and snack on them occasionally. I saw a recipe for making a pumpkin seed brittle, but you need 3 cups of hulled seeds for it. That would take me forever unless I figure out a quick and efficient way to hull the seeds.

So yeah, it's been a fun Halloween week. Monday, for family night, we baked cookies and decorated them to ding-dong-ditch deliver them to some of our ward friends. Tuesday the whole family went to mutual for a "spooky" dinner. Yesterday, pumpkins. Now I guess we better come up with something for the next couple nights to keep it going. Sounds like fun.

Here's Tegan singing "This is Halloween" from Nightmare Before Christmas.

Jennan's Birthday Cont.

Because Jennan's birthday was on a Sunday, we chose to have her birthday dinner the next day. So Monday, for family night, we went to Red Robin for birthday dinner!

Here is our crew, waiting to get their eat on.

Here's Tegan trying to tickle Jennan. They're getting along really great these days.

After dinner, we came home and executed a pinata. There was no rope used to give the pinata a fighting chance. It was tied to a tree. The birthday girl got the first whacks.

Then Tegan used her brutal one handed attack to soften the pinata up a bit.

Liam felt that the head shot was his best bet to crack this elephant open.

But it was Duncan's "homerun" swinging that finally did the pinata in.

Birthdays are fundays. Next one for our family isn't till December, when Duncan will be turning 8 years old.

Ready, Set, Garden!

It's Wednesday, so it's garden update day. (Here's last week's update.)

Here's the #1 mammoth sunflower. Looks to be a little over 2 feet tall, and going strong.


Mammoth sunflower #2. Doing quite well. I don't know that this one will ever be as big as #1, but I'm anxious to see how big it will get. This week, it's up to about 9 inches.

Here's the pumpkin. It's gotten a bit more yellow, but continues to grow. I finally transplanted it in the same area as the sunflowers since those seem to be doing pretty well. Hopefully the nutrients in the soil will help it turn green again. If not, I'll probably have to get some fertilizer.

For Family Home Evening Monday, we all went to Lowe's and picked out some veggies to grow. We chose some corn, roma tomato, zucchini, yellow crooked neck squash, and cantaloupe- our only fruit choice. We also picked out a rosemary plant, but haven't given it a permanent home yet.

In the second planter we mostly put down seeds. You can see one transplanted plant. That's the Lima bean plant Liam started at school. The seeds we planted are mostly like what we bought at Lowe's. We planted corn, zucchini, cantaloupe, and pumpkin.

I picked off some Sago palm "pups" from the in-law's mature Sago. They've "hardened off", and now I've put them in some soil specifically for palms. Sago's take quite a long time to grow, so it'll probably be months till we see anything coming out of these. And that's if I've done it right thus far. If I haven't, then nothing will happen other than the "pups" either drying out completely, or rotting from over watering.


So yeah, now we have to make sure we remember to water them all everyday, and not over water them. We probably need to buy some sort of mulch to help keep some moister in, and the sun off, the roots of the plants.

Now the hard part... the waiting.

Officially Blocked

Today is the first day of our Disney annual passes being blocked out for the summer. We won't be able to go back till the end of August.

We decided to go to Disneyland and California Adventure on Monday for our last time. Turned out that we weren't the only ones who thought that. As we came up to the parking structure, there was a sign that said that Disneyland was full, but that Ca. Adv. was still available. Disneyland was at capacity. We couldn't even park in the structure. That was full too. We had to park in "Simba" which is an overflow parking area behind the Disney hotel. There's no tram service there, so you have to walk from there to the Downtown Disney area, through Downtown Disney, and then to the park entrances. The kids were pretty cranky, and Anna and I wondered if we shouldn't have just turned around and gone home.

In the section between the entrance gates, there was a huge balloon depicting the house from "UP!". The kids were happy to get a picture in front of it. I took this shot while laying on the ground to get the right angle. I think I did a pretty good job.

Lines were pretty long. We made a point of going on the refurbished ferris wheel because we ran out of time to do it last time we went. Then we made our way over to the carousel, one of Tegan's favorite rides. Here's mommy and Tegan.

"Kids, turn around and say cheese."

After the carousel, we got in line for the Toy Story Mania ride. The line was only a little bit longer than usual. About half way through the line, Duncan and Liam started playing a nose grabbing game. We let them play it because they were doing a good job of using their karate blocks to protect their noses. Plus, they actually weren't being too rough about it, and they were having fun. Here's what some of it looked like...

Those were the only rides we went on. We still had fun. The boys did a great job walking a lot more than they usually do to get to and from the parks. They were plenty tired by the time we got to the van. I'm pretty sure they were all asleep by the time we got on the freeway. (Anna fell asleep shortly after we got on the freeway.)

A Week Ago...

A week ago we went to the Disneyland parks. That Monday, there was some kind of private party at Disneyland, and it was closing at 6pm. I think we got there at about 3 or 4pm, so we went to Disneyland first. California Adventure was open till 9pm, so after Disneyland, we went there. It was a fun evening.

Waiting in line at the It's a Small World ride.

I'm amazed at how nice the new boats are.

We packed in some dinner: pumpkin bread, bananas, grapes, chips, & juice. We're in front of the Talk to Crush building in CA Adv.

In line at the new Toy Story Midway ride/game.

I'm totally schooling Jennan!

Up and down, around and around.




Fun Times.

I forgot...

Just when I think I'm getting better at taking pictures of the fun stuff we do together as a family, I forget to take pictures of our family night activity.

It was Liam's turn to conduct. (That means he got to choose who said the prayers, which parent does the scripture story, what our activity or lesson will be [luckily he went with my idea], the tasty treat, etc.

For family home evening we made paper chain advent calendars. Basically a red and green paper chain, that we'll cut a link off of each day till Christmas day (a yellow link). Duncan, Liam, and Jennan each made one.

Our scripture story was Alma teaching about faith, and planting it like a seed in the ground, in our hearts. We've planted seeds together as a family before, so it was very cool to use that experience to teach a gospel principle.

For our tasty treat (refreshments), I made some ice cream. I put in a little rum extract with the vanilla, colored it blue, and called it "bubble-gum" flavored. Maybe next time we have ice cream, I'll make it pink and put in some peppermint extract.

Fun Stuff.

Pumpkin Carving Family Night

Our activity for family night last night was pumpkin carving. The cheapest place we found to get pumpkins this year was Stater Bros. Pumpkins were only 19 cents a pound. The biggest pumpkin I got was over 16 pounds, and less than $3.00.

Getting Started. (Guess no one said to say "cheese".)

We let the kids draw their own face designs on their pumpkins.


Duncan did his most detailed pumpkin face to date.


There's Jennan's.

Tegan waiting patiently.

After everyone had their faces drawn, Anna and I helped the younger kids hollow out their pumpkins and carve out the faces. And by helped I mean, we pretty much did it for them. After I cut the bottom out of Liam's pumpkin, I had him pull out all the "guts". I also cut out the bottom of Duncan's, and had him do the same. They were both a little timid about getting their hands all gooey, and it was too "stringy". So I got a scraper and scraped their pumpkins for them, but I left all the guts inside and had them pull it out. Again they were a bit timid, so I grabbed their hands and put them way in the pumpkins, my hand was behind theirs, and helped them curl their fingers to grab a big handful of guts. Then I pulled my hand out and told them to not let go and pull the guts out. They did. They each pulled all the guts out of their pumpkins.

I cut out Liam's face, trying to stay as close to his lines as possible. After I cut out a piece, I had Liam get the piece out. Duncan on the other hand wanted to get started right away, so I gave him a pumpkin cutter and he went to town. He had no real help doing his. (After he finished cutting a piece, I would go through his cuts again to make sure they were connected.)

Also at this point, the batteries in our camera died. We have no batteries to replace them with, bummer. But then I remembered our video camera has a "photo" setting, and has a full battery charge, so I got it out. The quality is no where near our regular camera, but it did the job.

Here's Jennan and her finished jack-o-lantern.

Liam with his completed jack-o-lanterns. The little one is from his field trip. The face is just drawn on. I think he tried to copy his big pumpkin. He did a good job if he did.

There goes Duncan, carving like a mad man! At one point he said his arm was hurting from all the cutting. Anna showed him how to "shake it out", and he kept at it. He was very determined.

Duncan's still going, but everyone else is done. Tegan got the draw on her pumpkin too. She was happy with that.

Anna and I didn't get a chance to carve our pumpkins during family night. We spent that time making sure the kids were enjoying their time making jack-o-lanterns. And we all had a good time.

After getting the kids to bed, we did carve our pumpkins.

Here's Anna's.

And here's mine.

Here they are all together.

It was a fun family night.

Family Home Evening

Last night for family home evening we made bird feeders.

We used small water bottles, and one 2 liter bottle. The kids got to paint the bottles, and I cut the holes and put the stick in.


It was great fun.


We also read the last part of the story of Alma and Amulek for our scripture lesson. Mom and Liam gave prayers. Duncan conducted. I was incharge of the scripture story, and the activity. For our tasty treat we had smoothies.








Next week, Liam is in charge and conducting.