Elise's New Bike

Elise won a bike at school yesterday.  A couple of weeks ago they had the kids fill out a little packet about school lunch (just a few coloring/activity pages) and the kids who turned them in were entered into a drawing.  Not very many kids turned theirs in, so the odds were in her favor.  She was pretty confident that she was going to win, but I kept telling her not to get her hopes up.  I guess she showed me.  Lucky girl!

Halloween 2012

We had a pretty low effort Halloween at this house.  We had listened to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the way to and from California, so the kids were totally okay with reprising the Harry Potter Halloween theme from last year.  I felt a little lame after the fact for having them wear the same costumes two years in a row, but it was really nice to not have to buy or make costumes this year.  We were slackers and didn’t do a family party or anything else very special this year.  We’ll call it our reset year.  We did carve pumpkins.  The kids all had very strong opinions about what they wanted to carve and did the bulk of the work on their own.  They needed just enough help to keep me busy moving from one to the other all night (except Emily who did hers on her own from start to finish).  When everyone was done, I carved my quality pumpkin in three minutes flat so it could make the photo shoot on the porch.

Emily and Elise were awake at 6:30 on Halloween morning.  Since we had an hour to kill, we did cute Gryffindor nails to go with their costumes.  The kids had the Halloween parade and class parties at school.  When they got home, we ran down to Lee’s for their trick-or-treating event and then waited around for it to be time to go trick-or-treating.  I took the kids to a few houses in our neighborhood and then we met up with friends.  Ben and his friends ventured out on their own while Wendy, Claudy, and I went around with the girls.  They were troopers and we covered lots of ground.  It was unseasonably warm (70 degrees) and the girls got really hot in their fleece Hogwarts robes.  They are already planning on having lightweight costumes next year so they won’t overheat.  It will probably snow. :)

The kids got tons of candy.  They all had a box of “candy sticks” that looked just like candy cigarettes that I used to buy when I was a kid.  I showed them how I used to pretend to smoke them and followed up with a quick reminder that “I don’t care if you pretend to smoke candy cigarettes, but never smoke the real ones.”  I might have created a monster with Abby.  She came in Thursday morning “smoking” a Kit Kat.

Snowman and Blanket Fort

We had an early snow storm last week.  It corresponded perfectly with an early out day for the kids.  Abby and her friends wanted to play in the snow and recruited me to help them build a snowman.  Being the lazy mom that I am, I delegated that honor to Emily.  She wasn't thrilled about it, but she had fun once she got out there with them.  I got a picture of their finished snowman just in the nick of time since Abby's friends knocked it over four seconds later. 

Despite her initial reluctance, Emily apparently didn't get her fill of snowman building with just one.  She made her own mini snowman on the front porch.

The cold weather kept the kids inside for most of the weekend.  Nate was a cool dad and helped the girls build a blanket fort to play in.  They even suckered him into letting them sleep in it on Saturday night.  He moved the piano benches in for extra support and made them a bed out of some foam pads.  They thought it was the coolest thing ever.  Abby moved into Grandma's bed before she fell asleep and ended up on the couch.  Probably a good thing since it was pretty tight quarters for all three girls and she is infamous for being a sleep kicker.

Fall Break Camping Trip

We took a fun camping trip to Willard Bay over UEA weekend.  It was our first experience with cold weather camping.  Our kids (especially Ben) weren’t exactly thrilled with leaving electronics behind to go camping, but it took all of two minutes once we got there for them to be in love with the idea.  Nate was worried that all of the good campsites would be taken, so we left our house at 9:00 Thursday morning and laughed out loud when we got there and saw that the campground was almost entirely empty.  Being early birds paid off and we got an awesome campsite.  It was huge and provided lots of opportunities for the kids to explore. 

We spent our days playing games, riding bikes, and walking out to the lake.  We had early campfires and then headed into the trailer to watch movies (Spiderman 1 & 2) and keep warm.  Our quality little electric heater did its job well and we slept comfortably even with overnight lows in the upper 30s.  We saw lots of different kinds of birds and found two snakes (one of which had to suffer through each kid taking a turn holding it).  We spent a bit of time skipping rocks.  Our favorite spot was a little pond that was separated from the rest of the lake.  On the way there, Nate found the perfect skipping stone.  He had Elise go stand on one bank and he skipped the rock all the way across the water so she could pick it up on the other side.  The rock made it across eight times.  It was such a fun game that when the rock didn’t make it on the ninth time, Nate had Ben take his shoes off and wade into the water to try (unsuccessfully) to find it.  All of the kids got lots of practice skipping rocks too and their skill level increased quite a bit over the three days we were there.  

The quote of the trip comes from Abby:  We rode our bikes down to Pelican Beach on the first day and when we got back I realized I hadn’t taken any pictures of the kids skipping rocks.  I said, “Maybe we should go back and do it again so I can get a picture.”  Abby looked right at me and said, “Mom, are you insane?!?!?”  Yeah, mostly.

Zoo Times Two

Elise had a fieldtrip to the zoo a couple of weeks ago.  I signed up to be a parent chaperone and Jody and Sarah decided to come along for the ride.  The weather was beautiful and we had a really fun day.  The two girls that were in Elise’s group are both in our ward.  It was funny to see their different reactions.  One of them would get super excited about every animal we saw (scream and giggle kind of excited) and the other one only wanted to spend about 12 seconds at any one exhibit before she was bored.  It was interesting.  The highlights were seeing the wolves up close, watching two tigers fighting, the baby giraffe, and the polar bear.

I decided to buy a membership to the zoo so I could take all of the kids a couple of times this year.  They got out of school early on Tuesday because of parent teacher conferences, so we headed down.  It was a perfect day to be at the zoo.  By the time we got there all of the fieldtrips had left for the day and we had the place pretty much to ourselves.  It was awesome!  We lucked out with our timing and saw lots of cool animal behaviors.  Emily made a list on the way home of all of the fun things we saw:

Between nagging the kids about homework and cleaning their rooms and practicing piano, lots of days I feel like I am just a bossy, grumpy mom.  It was really quite lovely to just hang out with them and have fun together.  We should do it more often.