It's been a fun past 10 days. Here's the catch up on our family happenings. Last Thursday the elementary kids all had their school Halloween parade and their Halloween class parties. Daniel, Sarah and Noah were so excited to wear their costumes to school. It was fun watching all the kids parading around the school showing off their costumes. When Noah, the bat, saw us watching him he ran over to give G&G T a big hug, but skipped by Aaron and me. How do you like that ;)?!
Sarah loved being Elsa:
Daniel was a skeleton:
I love seeing the Halloween parade every year. I will miss it when I don't have kids in elementary school anymore. Friday was the end of the term so the teachers got a professional day to put in grades which meant there was no school for anyone in the school district. Since we had a full free day we went and played. Aaron had to work so it was just me and the kids. We spent the day at the Clark Planetarium. It has been a while since we have been there so it was fun to see all the new exhibits and some of the old ones, too. They have a tornado exhibit where you can experiment with wind shear and something else I can't remember to make your own tornado. It was pretty interesting.
Nice tornado, Daniel:
Another favorite exhibit was the static electricity ball. Unfortunately, Josh and Daniel figured out that if you put one hand on the ball and touched someone else it would shock them. They would sit quietly waiting for one of us to walk by when they would jump out and touch us to shock us. It would only work if they had one hand on the static electricity ball at all times so as long as you stayed outside of 3 feet around the ball you were safe. However, they were patient and sometimes you would forget and get zapped. The stinkers!! Good thing the Planetarium wasn't very busy that day!
We then saw an IMAX 3D movie on the Journey to Space. It was awesome because it was only us and maybe 10 other people in the whole theater for the movie.
After the movie we played with the Newton's Daydream exhibit. It is a two story tall exhibit that moves small balls around different tracks hitting bells, drums and other things to make noise. It was really interesting to watch.
When we got home from the planetarium I was pleasantly surprised to find Aaron had cleaned the bathrooms for me. Oh I love my husband!! I was really dreading that job and he did it for me. That made my day!! After dinner it was time to carve pumpkins. Aaron and I don't mind carving pumpkins, but both of us HATE scooping out all the pumpkin guts. Luckily, Josh was a moderately willing recruit to get the job done.
The kids all designed their jack-o-lanterns:
Then Aaron and I tried to carve them:
Daniel is the one who got a hold of the camera to take pictures. He was all about getting everyone to pose with their pumpkins:
Later that night we wanted to watch a Halloween type movie. We decided on Ghostbusters because it mixes scary with humor so we thought the kids would like it. I do know that Sarah and Daniel are some tender hearts and don't really enjoy being super scared so we thought this movie would be great. Unfortunately, it ended up really scaring Sarah. Even a week later Sarah is having a hard time going to bed at night and sleeping all night without nightmares. I feel awful because I didn't think it would be that scary for them--I guess I was really wrong. Josh really loved the movie which wasn't a surprise because nothing scares that kid!
The next day, Saturday, which happened to be Halloween as well we went to Lagoon for the last day of the season. We had a lot of fun. We let everyone pick their favorite ride and we all went on it. Cannibal seemed to be a family favorite for this year as well as the Sky Tram which was mine. I am getting lame in my old age I guess. While Aaron took Josh and Matthew on Colossus the other three kids went on this ride:
Of course the kids couldn't pass by a photo op without getting a picture:
The kids liked this ride, too:
We really had a fun season with our passes this year. I think we got our monies worth out of them! Here are all of walking back out to the car for the last time this year:
When we got home it was time to get everyone ready to go trick or treating. After everyone was ready to go we stopped by Daniel's teacher's house first. She is a single lady who has never been married so she loves to have all her students stop by to trick or treat. She had fun seeing Daniel and his siblings. We also stopped by G&G T to let the kids show off their costumes. When we got back home it was time to go out trick or treating in our neighborhood. I do know that some people believe kids should stop going when they get too old, but Matthew doesn't quite understand why he wouldn't ever be allowed to go trick or treating so we let him go again this year. It comes as no surprise he was a train conductor.
As we got started trick or treating we stopped by our neighbor's house who really is a train engineer. He is so nice to Matthew. A few weeks ago he sent his kids over to give Matthew a 2016 Union Pacific calendar. Oh Matthew was so excited!! When we stopped by their house the neighbor saw Matthew and said, "Oh Matthew I have the perfect thing for your uniform!" He went and gave him a really nice Union Pacific pocket watch along with some Halloween candy. Matthew was pretty excited. I was so grateful! People can be so awesome!
Noah was a bat. All the boys have worn this costume. I am sad that this will be the last year it will fit anyone, but Noah sure did look cute coming from a biased mom!
Daniel was a skeleton:
Sarah was Elsa and I tried my hand at some face paint to complete the costume. Sarah was just excited to be able to wear makeup!
We let Josh go out trick or treating, too. He was a ghoul.
Here's everyone before we started trick or treating. Here's all our jack-o-lanterns, too:
During the weekend Daniel's allergist had a Halloween contest. You entered your Halloween pictures on Facebook on their Facebook page. After the weekend they had a drawing for a $25 Fandango movie gift card. I was excited to get a phone call Wednesday afternoon letting me know that this picture won the gift card. Wahoo!! Now we just have to wait for a family friendly movie to come out that we all want to see before we can use it.
The kids got all kinds of candy. A few of them also came home with some non candy items namely these noise makers--ugh!! After a few hours we had to confiscate them for safety reasons--haha!
It has snowed a few times this week. Every year you know it will happen at one point, but it always comes before I am ready!! The kids were all really excited to wake up and see it snowing, though. Sarah got dressed and ready for the day really fast so she could go out and play in it. She brought me the first snowball of the season to show me.
Sometimes among all the chaos of having five kids (six if you include my husband--haha), a house to clean, cooking, laundry, homework, etc. I get lost in the monotony. However, when one of my kids makes something like this and hands it to me just because it makes my day!! Thanks Sarah!
The past month has been pretty crazy for me. Our wards Young Women in Excellence was coming up and I was in charge of planning it on top of all the other things that were going on. Luckily, I had lots of good people that helped a ton! All the girls got assigned a part of the program as well as the Stake President and the bishop. The girl's also brought a Personal Progress project to show. Our theme was Heroes. We pulled 8 women from the scriptures to showed a particular value and spotlighted them. I wanted it to be a nice program for all the girls and their parents. It seemed to have turned out really well which was a big relief. Wednesday day before the program I was on edge and trying to get stuff together. Aaron surprised me by bringing me some lunch because he knew I hadn't eaten and probably wouldn't have a chance to eat. Again that was so sweet! Anyway, here's what our set up looked like before the program started:
The women examples that we used were Hannah was Faith, Emma Smith was Divine Nature, Rebekah was Individual Worth, Mothers of the Stripling Warriors was Knowledge, Daughters in the Wilderness were examples for Choice and Accountability, Ruth was Good Works, Esther was Integrity and Mary was Virtue. We had the Hero's pictures as well as the framed scriptures that go along with the Young Women Values.
I also was able to find flowers to represent all the Young Women Value colors which was interesting to find.
We have some really talented and awesome girls in our ward. All their projects were really neat to see.
After the program we had cheesecake for dessert with toppings I made for every value color. There was white chocolate for Faith (white), Blueberry for Divine Nature (blue), Strawberry for Individual Worth (red), Kiwi for Knowledge (green), Peach for Choice and Accountability (orange), pineapple for Good Works (yellow), Blackberry for Integrity (purple), and caramel for Virtue (gold).
It was a crazy week getting all of this put together so I wasn't too fun to live with, however, now it's done we are back to having some fun again.
#1 - I would love to have Matthew come trick or treating to my house! :)
ReplyDelete#2 - Holy cow. Your Young Women in Excellence looks awesome. Way to go!!! That looks like a LOT of work.