Our 1st SNOW day!

We got up at 7 to go to Wal-Mart to run some errands, but I opened the front door to see a surprise I DID NOT see coming, snow was coming down! Oh man. Nov 5th and we’ve got snow. It wasn’t cold enough to stick to the ground, but it was coming down from tiny specks to 1.5 inch fluffs.
So as you can guess we closed the door to rethink our wardrobe and I added “snow gloves” to my list of things to get at Wal-Mart.
I find driving in snow so distracting, I just want to look where the snow is falling and now my car. Don’t worry, I training myself to handle this like a local.
But I wish yall could have seen Andrews face. I was carrying him in my arms walking into Wal-Mart and he was just looking up and all around and squealing with joy! He was so excited to see snow! Amanda was really loving it too.
Crazy weather here, but this is how it’s going to be for us a while now. I really look forward to getting some great pictures of snow covered trees and woods. … and snow men… and snow balls… and snow forts…
Man I knew I was probably going to have a “white Christmas”, but it looks like I might have a white thanksgiving too.

TRUNK-or-TREAT

Amanda’s costume was pretty much my main focus of projects for October. She was a Fairy Princess! I made the tutu, the flower-ballet ties around her shoes, painted her nails purple, did the fairy style makeup, and braided her hair and put flowers in it, AND I made her trick or treat bag! She came out awesome! She’s such a pretty little fairy princess.

All ready to go to the trunk or treat party!

as you can see, Andrew was superman! The only thing I added to his costume was I put red socks OVER his shoes so it looks like superman’s red boots but it’s still comfy for him to walk in and it’s cheaper on me too! Smart eh? At the trunk or treat party everyone thought that Andrew was hilarious because he was a “superman with a soother” Canadians just love dry humor like that.

Here we are at the trunk or treat party. It’s hard going to a party where you don’t know anyone, but we tried to have a good time. Sorry about the red-eyes in some of the pictures, I don’t have my special CD from home to fix it. Derick kept saying our ward was way better, I’d have to agree. It was kind of lame. They didn’t even have music going on, and no treats or drinks either.

The trunk or treat was kind of weird. They had only 4 stations inside the gym. You go to each station (only allowed 1 time thru) you would get a stamp on your card and once you went to all the stations, you could go thru the haunted house… but that was way too scary for Amanda’s and Andrews age, so we didn’t even go to that. AND at the stations, they don’t even give out a prize like candy or cheap toy to the kids for playing! It was wait in a line, try something once, “oh you didn’t get it, NEXT!” type of thing. I thought that was very lame. But we did all the stations, here’s Amanda with her card.

Bowling for Ghosts. You rolled a plastic pumpkin at these white bowling pens that looked like ghosts. You only get 3 tries and sadly Amanda didn’t knock any down. It was a plastic pumpkin, not a ball, so it wouldn’t roll straight, and she didn’t want to throw it. So it just rolled off to the side and missed every time. I still gave her a high-5 and told her she did a great job trying.

Howl at the Moon: they hung donuts on string and had the kids eat them. Amanda just walked up, grabbed it with her hands, pulled it down and eat it. She’s a smart one what can I say??

Grave Digger: This was made and hosted by the bishop. He’s a very sweet happy guy, but this was a gruesome gory thing and probably the most fun for most kids. It’s a coffin with holes in the top. You have to place your hand thru and dig around all this yucky feeling stuff like rice, pasta, and goo to find a spider ring. They have a station for you to wash your hands at when you’re done. At least at this one you get to KEEP something! Amanda, so funny, she looks IN the hole with this yucky look on her face, pulls up her sleeve and goes in and pulls right out the spider ring, she didn’t rummage in the muck at all cause she LOOKED in first. All well, I can’t blame her.

Pin the Grin on the Pumpkin: they blind fold you and you try to pen the pumpkins grin in the right place. 1 turn – take a look where you pined it, and move on.

We got kind of board fast. We did a lot of waiting and sitting. Sadly they didn’t have ANYTHING else to do after the 4 stations. So there was a whole group of small kids who were just sitting around waiting to trunk-or-treating part to begin. And we all know just how WELL LITTLE KIDS WAIT when CANDY’S involved!! Seriously – who thought of that? If I was in charge of trunk or treating, I would make it so the trunks WERE 1st – AND turn the TRUNKS into a walk thru carnival type of experience. You would go trunk to trunk doing something simple and fun and then get candy and then move on. And THEN when you were done you could move inside do some things like these guys did, but you would have some stuff to do to keep you busy. Dancing, coloring, treats and drinks, trade candy, something like that. I wish someone would do it that way!

My car wasn’t half as cool as it was the year before. Last year I spend DAYS painting this Charlie Brown pumpkin display. But like I said – we had no budget for frilly car displays this year so I was just trying to work with what I had. So I brought my pumpkins and Amanda and I made 2 ghosts and I brought (I thought this was smart of me) all these trick-or-treat buckets they were giving out with every happy meal at McDonalds during October… I taped them up and put in lights and made lanterns. I was trying to just use what I had. And we took a lot of road trips this month and got a bunch of these buckets as you can see. One lady made me feel badly though. She said “holy cow! You buy your kids too much fast food! Come on girl!” yeah – that really turned the night around into a bundle of joy! Whatever. I didn’t even KNOW the lady, it was rude ya know and it hurt my feelings.

Our humble Halloween

Halloween was NOT the same this year. We knew it wouldn’t be, but it was still kind of disappointing when Halloween night came. We did our best to make it fun though. But I had to figure out how to make fun stuff with NO money spent on Halloween decorations this year, which is VERY different for me.
The kids got to decorate a Halloween scene card from nana and papa

Nana and papa also sent them pumpkin cups – they loved those.

We cut out ghosts and bats and hung them from the ceiling in the living room

We colored some bats and put stickers on them, and then put them on the windows in the living room.

We did a lot of coloring and put it up on our wall

Some of the pictures Amanda colored I placed on the cabinets in the kitchen

I had some leftover flowers and leaves from making Amanda’s costume so I taped them to the light above the table in the kitchen

We printed out some characters so we could tell some stories and rhymes around the kitchen table. (like 5 little pumpkins)

We carved pumpkins a week before Halloween. Everyone said you could do that weeks before Halloween here because it’s so cold. But they curled a few days before Halloween anyhow. So we bought 2 more pumpkins and carved them again on Sat (the day BEFORE Halloween).
These were our first 2

And these were our second set.

I saw this lumpy funny looking pumpkin, and I got inspired to carve this pumpkin after the pumpkin “who couldn’t smile” from the raggedy Ann and Andy show. Do yall remember that? I watched the cartoon with Amanda for the first time on you tub and then cut the pumpkin. I think I did a good job.

We made a lot of pumpkin seed mix