Spooktacular Halloween

It feels like a luxury to have Halloween on a Saturday. Instead of rushing to get the kids into their costumes and off to school, throwing a Halloween party at school, getting everyone home and fed in record time and out the door to trick-or-treat, we got up and had a leisurely breakfast, cleaned the house, did some boo bubbles (more on that in a minute) and then prepared for a Halloween dinner without feeling pressed for time. It was great!

Now for some details about our activities.

Nathan’s science teacher took advantage of the holiday to teach her students some seriously cool science involving dry ice and soap bubbles. Nathan came home all jazzed up and wanted to try it out at home. Over the week before Halloween, Kev helped him gather the necessary supplies and make his very own “boo bubble” maker. The following pictures should prove to you that science is totally fun:

Daniel and Nathan have passed our family cut off for trick-or-treating so instead they did baptisms for the dead (helping the dead on Halloween-I love it!) and had dinner and a party with the older cousins. The big kid party wasn’t a costume event, but Daniel and Nathan got to wear their costumes to school on Thursday (they had no school yesterday) and Daniel also wore his for his band concert earlier in the week.

Daniel as Zoot (the sax player from The Muppet Show)

Nathan as The Phantom of the Opera

The younger ones gathered at our house for dinner and the evening’s begging for treats (and doughnuts, and hot dogs…our neighborhood is a great place for trick-or-treating!). We ate bloody fingers and had shrunken heads floating in our warm cider.

We let Matthew and the older part of the trick-or-treating crew take off on their own and they had a great time.

Matthew as The Shadow

The adults hung out with Malia and Kate and it was nice to move at their pace rather than Matthew’s pace. They had a great time and by the time we had traveled the most popular locales, Malia was ready to be done. Let’s face it-glass slippers just aren’t made for walking. But she had a great time!

Malia as Cinderella

Malia and Kate

The Great Pumpkin Caper

We were last minute pumpkin artists this year. The kids have been planning their designs all week but we didn’t get around to actually carving them until tonight. As always, it was pretty easy to figure out which pumpkin belonged to each kid.

I think they all turned out great, but Spiderman looked particularly fantastic when it was lit!

Bibbity Bobbity Boo

Malia’s Halloween costume has been finished for a week or so. She knew she was not allowed to wear it until Halloween and today was her party at preschool. She was so stoked! Seriously, that is one happy Cinderella.



She played some games, read her Clifford News all about pumpkins and made Monster Stew. Malia was asked to bring dragon brains (aka Skittles).



She waited very patiently for her turn to stir…

…then got a little crazy because the bowl was so full.



She had a wonderful time!

And as a side note, I love this Cinderella hairdo we found on Pinterest. If she’ll let me, I think this style will be making multiple appearances in her future.

The Educational Value of Dr. Demento

A couple of weeks ago Malia came to me and said, “Mom, I better not smoke two joints.” I laughed because 1) it was completely out of the blue, 2) it is not something you expect your four year old to say, and 3) it is just further proof that my kids are probably more interesting (“interesting” meaning “screwed up”) than most other kids. And she’s not wrong. But lest you think that Kev and I are cultivating “weed” when we talk about how great our weeds are growing, let me give you the back story.

When I was a kid, I remember staying up late on Sunday nights to listen to the Dr. Demento Show. This behavior was in no way was condoned by my parents. Jon and Patti (my older brother and sister) and I would go to bed like obedient children, but then lay awake so we could turn on the radio at the appointed hour and quietly listen in the dark. Dr. Demento was funny then, but it is far more hilarious now that I’m an adult and actually have a frame a reference for all the things the songs mock. I mean, back then I had no idea what a lavatory was and so the song “Seven Old Ladies Locked in a Lavatory” did not spark much laughter. However, “I’m Looking Over My Dead Dog Rover” was funny in spite of my youth.

Many years later, I married Kev and was pleased to learn that he was actually familiar (and a fan) of Dr. Demento as well. I gave him several “Best of…” albums as a Christmas present a few years into our marriage and now we are busy exposing our children to the extreme randomness. It’s actually pretty bizarre how often one or another of those crazy songs works its way into our conversations…

Anyway, one of the tracks on one of those albums is a song called “Smoke Two Joints.” Our kids have all heard it and since they had no idea what a joint was, it sparked a conversation about marijuana which included the word of wisdom and why it is bad for you, including how it makes you stupid…just like the song. So in spite of the fact that the talk was precipitated by a completely random comment (mine, if I remember correctly) about smoking two joints, it did, in fact, have some value to it. And in my opinion, anything that leads to a good teaching moment has value.

Again?! Seriously?!!

So you know when I mentioned last month that financial fraud of some kind will most likely happen to most of us sooner or later? Well apparently Kev and I have won the lottery of bank fraud because it has happened to us both sooner and later. Last time we lucked out and it was only about $28. This time it is in the $3700 range depending on how everything converts to U.S. dollars (the transactions were in Great Britain). When my card was compromised last month, we replaced all the cards associated with the account which means that this particular debit card (it was Kev’s this time) has been active for less than two months. So this afternoon has been kind of stressful. We will be reimbursed for the loss, but the bank can’t do that until after the transactions actually post to the account. In the meantime, we have to do some grand money shuffling to make sure that there is enough money to cover all the bills we paid last week. At least the check for the mortgage has already cleared…

Touchdown!

For his experience gift last Christmas, we gave Matthew a trip to a BYU basketball game and another to a BYU football game. His basketball game was earlier this year, but football had to wait until the fall. Over the summer we came across a flyer for the Cosmo Club which gives kids a t-shirt, 4 football tickets and 8 basketball tickets (meant to be used for multiple games for the child and a guardian), free entrance to other BYU sports games when they wear their t-shirt and other special events all for $50. It was a great deal so we opted to do that rather than just a single football game.

Yesterday was Matthew’s first ever BYU football game. The Cosmo Club kids were invited to be on the field a couple of hours before the game where they met Cosmo, tossed a football around and basically had a great time.

He didn’t even care that their seats probably should have included an oxygen mask or that the Cougars won by so much that it wasn’t actually a terribly exciting game. He was just thrilled to be there!

After the game the kids got to ring the victory bell and rub shoulders with several of the players.

Matthew has been excited all week and yesterday was definitely a winner! (So here's a little confession: I may not be all that into sports, but it is nice to have a kid who cheers for my alma mater!)

I've Created a Cookie Monster

A few months ago we had a family home evening lesson of service. As part of the lesson, I had each family member write down one act of service that they would commit to doing. Nathan decided he was going to make cookies for his piano teacher so a few days later he pulled out the cookbook and I walked him through the recipe. He did a great job and discovered that he really enjoyed the process.

Since then, he has started leafing through the cookbook and making cookies whenever the fancy strikes him. He is keeping us well fed with chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, Chinese almond cookies, and he even discovered an oatmeal white chocolate cranberry cookie recipe I haven’t made in years because I have never been able to find dairy free white chips, Matthew was too young to understand that he couldn’t have the normal white chips, Daniel and Nathan were too inexperienced to know that they needed to keep the cookies away from Matthew and I was not experienced enough to figure out how to work around that. With some input from me based on the past seven years of experience, Nathan worked around it nicely, baking a tray for Matthew before adding the white chips for the rest of us. I think it is great that he is getting confident enough to just pull up a recipe and go for it. And I haven’t heard any complaints from the other kids. :-)

This morning he moved on to muffins…

Picking a Pumpkin

Today was Malia’s annual field trip to our favorite pumpkin patch. She got to try out some tractors, pick a pumpkin, listen to a story and take a hay ride. On the hayride, the farmer gave the kids some info about the farm. He grows field corn to feed his animals and when he asked if anyone knew how to shuck corn, Malia popped right up and told him she knew how. He had her show everyone how to shuck the corn (she did a great job) and then showed them how to get the corn off the cob to feed the chickens. Malia had a great time!