Alex

Alex is a baby that was staying with us for a couple of months, and he just went home last week.  At that time I asked permission to post a pic of him on my internet blog. So now anyone who didn't visit me in the past couple of months can see him!

Also, everyone kept telling me he looks like Liam, so here's the baby picture side-by-side.

Alexander

Liam

Yeah, I guess I can see it.

Halloween Head Start

Liam has asked to be at least 5 different things for Halloween this year.  Although the top two that keep getting asked for are Loki (villain from The Avengers) and Stump Smash (character in the video game Skylanders). So I decided I'm going to make a bunch of costumes, put them in the dress-up box, and then he can just pick from the dress-up box on Halloween.

I had to start with Loki, because he's one of my favorite characters. It's simple, but I think it turned out cool:

he has black pants and black shirt for Halloween night.

Reese has asked to be the Pirate Princess from Jake and the Neverland Pirates, so I'll post that next, and then we'll get to Stump Smash and see if the kids have asked for anything else by then.

I was just thinking about Shelly today.

Ward Talent Show

Our Ward talent show, which the Young Men and Young Women were in charge of (and I by extension as a YW leader) was a success!

We all participated.

Liam and Reese made some drawings:

Liam

Reese:

Will was on the video display doing the Rubik's cube.  He also won the "Fastest diapering by a dad" competition. So technically Alexander even participated.

 I did a themed dessert display: "Cultural Icons as Dessert"

West Africa-  Ceremonial Mask- cake, ganache

Japan - Sushi - Vanilla rice and sour straw, Coconut rice and marzipan, wrapped in fruit leather "seaweed"

Mexico - sombreros - Cannoli shells and filling

Britain - teacups - chocolate and caramel

Greece - Olympic Torch - creme brulee

The whole display

We're each going to try to do something different for next year.

Tantrum

Liam has been in a sour mood all day and refused to take a nap.  Luckily, when he was screaming because I wasn't making dinner at 4:30, it was the shortest tantrum of the day.

He event had put on his jammies!  Too bad we had to go out later...

Monster Trucks

I don't know why Google Chrome isn't letting me blog, but I thought for a whole week that maybe the system was down.  Or I would have posted before.

Three weeks ago the kids brought a pop-up truck book home from the library.  One of the pop-up trucks was a monster truck.  It was running over a pop-up car.  Reese, with her tender heard, asked if there were people in the car when the truck was running it over.  She was very concerned.  We had to explain that monster trucks were just for fun, and that they didn't hurt people (on purpose, but we left that part out).  To prove the point, Will found some monster truck footage on Youtube.  Ever since the kids have been obsessed with monster trucks.

 

 

We let them earn a trip to see monster trucks in real life.

 

It was really loud.  Thank goodness we have family and friends with those ear muff sound cancelling thingies.  I have no idea what they are really called.

I got a groupon (Thanks for the tip, Mom) for really good seats for less than we would have paid for bad seats if we had gone through the box office.  Score 1 for being frugal!

 

Also, rather than buy souvenirs at the event, I used some fabric scraps to sew them some monster truck goody bags for free and filled them with things for much less than purchasing them there. Score 2 for being frugal!

 

Toys R Us was having a Hot Wheels sale and Hot Wheels happens to make monster truck toys. This truck, Obsessed, was one of the trucks at our show!

 

Monster truck shirts pre-purchased at Target for 1/4 the cost of buying at the event.  I put them in the kids drawers the night before so when they got dressed in the morning they would find them and get excited.

And Obsessed is the truck in blue

 

We got a little footage of him before Liam even opened his bag (we waited until we were there to give the kids the goody bags) to find his toy matched a truck in the arena!

 

PS: In case anyone else ever tries to save money by pre-buying souvenirs, they always seem to have a glow in the dark or light up trinket to buy at big events, and I looked online to see if I could find what they sell at monster truck rallies.  I couldn't, and ended up getting the kids glow stick wands at the dollar store so they would have something to wave around.

In the unlikely event that you are going to a monster truck rally and want to save money like me, they sell LIGHT UP CHECKERED FLAGS.  Had I known this, I would have purchased a small amount of checkered fabric and sewn or glued them to a glow stick.  And then I would have gone to the event to find that they are only $5 anyway.

 



Reese Art

couch, wood paneling, colorful rug.

Reese with gingerbread man