Trick or Treat!

The week of Halloween was full of fun for us. On Tuesday we went with my mom to her ward's Halloween carnival put on by the young women. The girls had fun throwing bean bags, decorating a bag, doing the cake walk, getting their faces painted, getting balloon animals, rolling in candy, etc.! It was fun to spend the evening with Grandma. Then on Thursday we had our Bears (cub scouts) over for den meeting where we roasted "Mummy Dogs," painted pumpkins, and made the ever-classic ghost suckers. Olivia had so much fun painting pumpkins that day that on Friday we got the paint back out and painted pumpkins some more, and then we decided we should paint each other's faces (brave Mommy)! Olivia did pumpkins on my face and I did a spider web w/spider and a witch on her. It was lots of fun. After raking leaves all day Saturday while Daddy was setting up his shed here in Shelley, we went to the 3rd annual pumpkin walk at the Bingham County park. I thought it was fun and quite impressive for it being only in its third year running. We are thinking we should see about signing up to do a scene for next year. It looks like lots of fun, and the theme will be "Dreams do come true"--any ideas? :) After the pumpkin walk, we headed to town and visited with some of David's family. One of houses we went trick-or-treating to along the way gave Aubrey a Tootsie Pop and she would not let it go--she kept sucking it on it with the wrapper on, and when we asked if it was yummy, she nodded very enthusiastically (that's her new trick--nodding and shaking her head to communicate). Olivia liked practicing her witch laugh, which she has done over the last few weeks, and Aubrey also picked it up, which was really cute. Olivia liked to say to people, "Come here my little pretty!" in a very witchy voice. Altogether it was a great holiday, and our little witch and her black kitty had a blast!

A (Not-So)Recent Roundup of the Goings-On Around Here

Here is a conglomeration of pictures from various activities we have enjoyed since moving into the new house...
Huckleberry picking--we went about three times and got lots of yummy berries! There were a few challenges, though--Olivia threw up two different times, and Aubrey only stayed happy for a few minutes each time--after that we took turns trying to make her happy while the other one picked. This was when she finally just gave it up and went to sleep.

She is such a funny girl. Whenever she is mad she folds herself in half like this and cries. This time she fell asleep that way. :)

I made this flower cake for mine, Miranda's and Grandma's birthdays, which we celebrated at the same time as Aubrey's since we were moving on Aubrey's birthday.

Here is Aubrey's birthday cake!

Eyeing the goods...

Excitement is building...going...

Going...

Gone! She definitely inherited a sweet-tooth! Thanks to all the family for coming out and making it a special day!

This is the sour-face that Olivia has been giving me lately--it is hard not to laugh at sometimes:)

First day of preschool! Some friends and I are doing a mommy-swap preschool with our 3-year-olds. It has been lots of fun so far!

We went to the annual Spud Day (that's right, I said Spud Day:) celebration with my good friend Sesha and her kids and Karen and Troy and their boys. Here is a group shot of the big kids.

And the babies...

My spud princess--this is one of those outfits she wouldn't leave the house without for a while:)

An old-time fire engine

Kolter covering his ears from the siren

Only in Idaho...(well, maybe not)

Daddy, Aubrey, and Matt-bud on the motorcycle

Spudnik--need I say more?

The parade was pretty impressive, I must admit! From there we walked down to the festivities at the park, which included free yummy baked potatoes (loaded!) and chocolate milk, booths of fun activities for the kids, fair food, vendors, etc. The highlight of the day for me was when Sesha convinced me to participate in the spud-picking competition, and then I insisted she come with me. For those of you who don't know (I didn't), the spud-picking contest went like this: each person is set up with a row of piled potatoes dumped from gunny-sacks, which sacks are laid to the side of the row for re-filling during the race, and a metal wire basket. The race is simple; fill the basket with potatoes and dump them into the gunny sacks. It was harder than it looks! Sesha and I were amateurs, so we were mainly just competing against each other--I won;) Next year I'm going for the cash-prize!

We were excited to move our old firepit from the Idaho Falls house to this house--these pics are from our first weenie roast at the new house.

Daddy and his girls chillin' by the fire

Olivia has gotten to be quite a good little roaster!

We have also been doing a lot of canning this year--green beans and carrots with the help of my friend Sesha, salsa with the help of Miranda, frozen corn from Sam's dad's garden, freezer jam from my mom's raspberry bushes, David and I worked together on the pears, Karen (David's sister) and I did peaches together, and Sara and Sam brought out a TON of apples, so we did apple pie filling and apple butter together. This shot is of one of the many times we caught Aubrey snitching a bite of apple. We could have filled a bucket with all the apples that had little nibbles taken out of them. This was also the night that Aubrey took her first steps!

I just had to add this cute little funny video of Aubrey eating Ramen--she was really enjoying it!

The BIG REVEAL Posting

Okay, so this will probably be a little anticlimactic for some family and friends, since many of you who live closeby and even some who don't have already seen the house in person by now. If I had just remembered, in my awake-for-48-hours-straight-state to take pictures of what we had done to the house BEFORE we moved all our stuff in I would have been blogging ever since. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, so I had to first unpack and organize and then try to remember to take pictures on a day when the house was actually looking decent. I should clarify--usually the house looks decent at some point every day--it just doesn't last very long, so I have a relatively small window of time in which to take pictures, and I inevitably forgot for a long time. So finally I decided that I might as well just take pictures of the house the way it is.

So without further ado...

Here are some pics of the inside of our new house, complete with all of our junk!:)

(I still have to paint the doors of the kitchen cabinets and we haven't tackled the master bedroom downstairs, so there is more to come in the next few months!)