Happy Halloween!

We hope you had as much fun as our Cinderella, Blue Dinosaur, and Baby Bumblebee!

Mighty Fine!

After my work's Halloween Spooktacular this evening, we decided to take the kids out for some food. We ended up going to "Mighty Fine Burgers" - it's managed/owned by the same people that have the Rudy's BBQ restaurants here in Texas. Anywho, we got Abby and Collin each a burger, and started feeding Evan some peaches. Collin, as it so often happens when we eat out, found something interesting under the table and was hanging out under then when this lady comes over to our table to tell us, "You have such well behaved children!" Just as she finished saying that, Collin popped back out from under the table, and blew a raspberry right in her face. What timing.

We kept going though, and crazy enough, about 10 minutes before we left, another person came over to our table and said, "You're children are so well behaved!" Thankfully, she was on the other side of the table, and I think Collin's raspberry reflex requires you to be within a two foot radius. So I'm pretty sure she still believed that as she walked away.

Mighty Fine? Mighty Fine indeed. The kids do usually act OK when we eat out, but this is first time we've gotten those comments without Amy having to wear her "please compliment me" sign... Ok, she doesn't a sign like that, but this was a first for us.

Easiest Pumpkin Carving EVER!!

I've seen some "jack-o-lanterns" over the last couple of Halloweens that looked more like Mr. Potato Heads. Admittedly, when I saw them, I thought, "Come on now - how hard is it really to carve a pumpkin for Halloween?" Well, tonight when I had the option to go and buy a few of those pieces or to carve the pumpkins that had been sitting outside for the last few weeks, it really was a no-brainer: Get the Mr. Potato Head pieces.

The kids each picked out a box of these for a whopping $3.50 each at Walmart, and bam! 7 instant "jack-o-lanterns"! No knives! No fire! No mess! Just good times!

Crazy

This morning I walked into Collin and Abby's room to see two step stools stacked on top of each other. Collin and I then had the following conversation:

Logan: "Why are there two step stools stacked on each other?... (after noticing a shirt on the ground)... Were you getting a shirt down?"
Collin: "Yeah!"
Logan: "Collin... sometimes-"
Collin: "-Me know. Me crazy."

One awesome weekend...

   
This past week, the family decided it was time we went camping. We'd been afraid of kids around the fire, around water, being out in the heat all day, etc. But two things happened that made us change our minds. First, the Westons - we've seen all these pictures of Dan, Kristina and their kids out and it just looked fun! Second, we looked at the next 2 months or so, and pretty much every weekend is booked solid with one thing or another. With the weather being so perfect right now, with low 50's in the morning and low 80's at the hottest, it was just time.

Three neat things

1. When we arrived at the campground we found out that in the time we were traveling there, they had enforced a no burn ordinance for the whole county! All we could think was "No smores!? That is just not going to work!" Well as it turns out a no burn ordinance means no wood fires or fires in fire pits, but you can still use charcoal. Luckily this campground has BBQ's and charcoal was still allowed in those. Who'd have thought smores could be so delicious over charcoal?

2. Well after a little while it started to get dark (it was only about 6:45 pm) and Abby announced "Mom, it is getting so dark let's go to bed." Awesome! We ended up keeping them up a little longer until about 7:30 and then they all slept through the night. It has always been a huge camping fear of mine that the kids would never go to sleep and we would have to pack up and go home at 2 am.

3. Fishing poles for kids are great! They were about $10 each and at Academy Sports they had about 20 different kinds of kid poles. Abby picked Disney princesses and Collin picked Scooby Doo (he has never seen the show, but went on the ride at 6 flags about 5 times and loved it). They come with a little rubber toy thing on the end to practice casting safely. They liked doing that way longer than actual fishing. Next time I am not even going to bring the worms and hooks (they were super gross anyways).

Well after a very fun two days we packed up and came home, and I started throwing everything into the washer. After about 2 loads the laundry room flooded with a few inches of water. I thought "Well I have been meaning to mop in here, now is as good of time as any, little more water than I would have used but oh well." Well on the next load the washer stopped working all together, it is now in about 50 pieces in the laundry room.

Motor Coupling piece to fix washer - $15
Time spent on a Saturday to fix the washer - 3 hours
Figuring out how to take apart, fix and put back together a washer without breaking it further - Priceless

Growing Up

Abby was invited to a birthday party today. She was very insistent that she was old enough to go to parties without mommy anymore. "Mom the card only had my name on it, so I just get to go. I want you to stay home and clean the house."

What the heck!