Costumes, Characters, & Candy

I LOVE Halloween! I love dressing up, I love seeing all the kids in different costumes, I love all the excitement, I love the chocolate and the candy, I love the pumpkin carving, I love the colorful and spooky decorations--there's nothing about Halloween that I don't like! With all the different parties this year, the kids dressed up in costumes FOUR times!!! Which is pure awesomeness for me, and pure agony for Josh!!!

At the ward party, we were the SpongeBob clan. We've been planning on being the crew from the cartoon show ever since last fall! I did our homemade costumes, which is so fun for me! Josh was Squidward (you can't see his four blue legs in the photo), I was Sandy (as she dresses in her dome home), Ammon was Mr. Krabs, Jonah was SpongeBob, Micah was Patrick, and Kanyon was Plankton (he refused to take his backpack and red hat off for the photo).

For the class party/costume parade at school, Jonah and Micah were identical Spidermen and Ammon was a Zombie.

For the town merchant's trick-or-treating and the school carnival, the twins were their SpongeBob & Patrick Star duo once more, Ammon was a zombie again, and Kanyon was Superman.

For Halloween night and neighborhood trick-or-treating, the boys were all superheroes: the twins were Spiderman again, and Ammon joined Kanyon as an identical Superman! (I love the photo--they were all touching each other like a big circle of love with no prompting from me to do so!)

Josh has just one request at Halloween-time, "only buy candy to hand out that I would eat as leftovers if we don't get any trick-or-treaters". I'll never say no to chocolate--so I was more than thrilled to fill our giveaway bowl with lots of Snickers, Reese's and Kit-Kats!

By the end of Halloween night, after all the celebrations were over, the boys' buckets were super full! Their very first and favorite thing they ate was popcorn balls, followed by giant candy bars and glow sticks, all of which came from some of our neighbors. The boys sorted through their buckets, and Ammon got everything that the twins said they wouldn't eat. His bucket was overflowing!

We had a great Halloween! The boys were happy for all the goodies they got. Josh was happy because we only had a handful of trick-or-treaters so he got to have a bowl full of chocolates! And I was so happy to see the kids' buckets' contents emptied, as the wrappers were all over the floors of the house, rather than the garbage can, for over a week!! Can't wait 'til Halloween next year already!!!

Pumpkin Perfection

We had a wonderful time picking our own pumpkins out of the patch. Even though none of our original picks were left, there were still plenty of great pumpkins to choose from! Ammon was all about having the biggest one, and he got the biggest one left, which was 36 pounds. Each year, we try to get pumpkins for the boys that range from biggest to smallest according to their place in the family from oldest to youngest. After everyone picked their pumpkins, we weighed them all and surprisingly it worked that way again this year! Kanyon's was the littlest and it weighed 18 pounds. The Monday before Halloween, Josh had a school board meeting, but we chose to carve pumpkins that night as a FHE activity without him. Of course, the first step is de-gutting and each boy scooped out their own pumpkin. We all thought it was hilarious AND disgusting that Kanyon kept eating his pumpkins' guts. I was the unlucky one, with the pumpkin FULL of massive thick spiderweb guts. After the pumpkins were cleaned out, each boy told me what they wanted carved. Jonah and Ammon drew their designs on paper so I would get it right. Micah wanted a horse, and I'm not artistic in any way, so I looked up online how to draw a simple horse and went from there. Kanyon called his pumpkin "Oh Toodles", the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse magical assistant.

(see evidence of the pumpkin's guts around Kanyon's mouth?!)

Josh and I gutted and carved our own pumpkins on Halloween night just in time for the first trick-or-treaters. We both chose to carve self-portraits into our pumpkins, can you tell?!!I'm quite proud of all our Pumpkin Creations! We had such a great time together carving them this year! Even though I'm not artistic, I AM a perfectionist, and I like carving and getting everyone's design's "just right". It's usually not a very peaceful activity when Josh is involved because he doesn't particulary enjoy it! But it was so delightful this year and the boys loved seeing each other's designs take shape:

Seeing our jack-o-lanterns lighted up on the porch was the perfect finale to the fun activity!

Leaves

Raking the leaves into giant piles and jumping in them is a favorite fall pastime of ours! This year, the boys did it twice, and both times with different cousins!!! There's no better way to spend a fall day than having fun outside with people we love!

In Tremonton, the boys played in the leaves with the Perkins cousins in Grandma Perkins' backyard:

In Salmon, the boys raked and jumped in the leaves with the Forsgren cousins in our backyard and Grandma Tolman's backyard:

The Family is of God

I recently heard this song: The Family is of God and I love it.
(To hear the song, pause my blog music at the bottom of this page, then click the song name link.)

God gave us families

to help us become

what He wants us to be--

This is how He shares His love,

for the family is of God.

Funeral begins with F-U-N

Spokane is just over 5 hours from Salmon, and going to my Grandma's funeral was going to be a 24-hour trip for me. I chose to go without Josh and the boys, but worried about driving alone for the long distance in such a short time. The road from here to there goes over multiple mountain passes, with no cell phone or radio reception in several places, and I was afraid of falling asleep. So I asked my friend KIMI to come along. After we got to the hotel, she asked me "Why does Funeral start with FUN?" And it took me a minute to figure out what she meant!

We decided to make the most of the road trip. On Sunday night, I visited with my Grandpa while she worked on homework at the hotel. Then we ate dinner together at Denny's. We ate our hungry hearts out!! And got super bloated and overly full in the process. So, we decided to go swimming back at the hotel to burn off all the calories. We were the only ones in the pool that late at night, and we enjoyed it! We laughed and soaked in the hot tub until exhaustion set in.

The next morning was the funeral, and she came with me and recorded the program for the rest of my family. After we left Spokane, we stopped at a really neat park in Couer d'Alene that is dedicated as a 9/11 memorial playground.

We played on all the cool "Fire-Truck" themed toys. My favorite was the giant Firemans Hat, with a pole on one end and a slide on the other.

Then we looked at the 9/11 memorial model of the WTC. There was a diagram of all the buildings surrounding the twin towers in New York, listing the name of each building, and how much damage was done to each one because of the collapse of the towers. It was amazing to me.
There was also a plaque listing all the firefighters in Idaho who had lost their lives while serving. I checked to make sure Jeff Allen was on the list, a firefighter from Salmon who died in 2003. There was some really neat re-bar sculptures of Firefighters and Police Officers surrounding the memorial area. They were larger than life, and really made an impression on me.

We got back in the car, and drove for quite a while before our next stop: the Cataldo Mission. We got there just minutes before 5:00, which is their closing time, so we didn't tour it inside. But we did take some photos of the place.

We also got a few photos of a dead squirrel lying in the road by the parking lot (we got a few strange looks from drivers passing us by, too)!!!

We stopped again in Missoula for a little bit of shopping and eating, and drove over the last mountain pass before Salmon. We tried to take a self-portrait with the Idaho sign in the background at the top of the summit, but all you can see of it is a little blue blur above my head. But you can definitely see the snow we encountered (the two white circles)!

We were so ready to be back in our hometown! We had a good time and I was SO glad Kimi came with me, but I was physically and emotionally beat by the time I got home at midnight.