Taste Test

One of our family's favorite shows is Good Eats on the food network. On a recent episode, Alton Brown showed how to make your own candy corn. We decided to try the recipe and have a taste test to see what everyone liked the best.

On 3 Dark and Pleasant Nights

a penguin

a pink princess or two

two Guatemalan kids

a dragon (see the wings!)

and an ant attacking a picnic

Neighborhood trick-or-treat, ward trunk-or-treat and chili cook-off, and city trick-or-treat comprised Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings. The weather was great. Cool enough to remind us that fall is here, and sweaters are needed. Our ant won 2nd place at work, and 1st place at the ward. The ward contest would be more impressive if he actually had some competition, but there was none for the adult male category. Our candy haul was the best ever. We are set between now and Easter. Little do the kids know that I siphoned off most of their candy for all the holidays between now and then. Wa-ha-ha-ha (imagine maniacal laughter). Don't worry, their buckets were returned 2/3rds full. I then asked for contributions to seminary, and they shared willingly. Thanks kids!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Cookies and Ice Cream!

With Halloween coming up, the kids are really excited. We haven't completely decided what we're all going to do for costumes, but we'll have to get that worked out this week. The kids keep trying to jump out and scare each other. One of their uncles works at a corn maze right now, that does a spooky version at night and they were told that he was able to scare someone who no one had been able to scare. The kids asked how he did it, and Mike told them that he jumped out and yelled "Cookies and Ice Cream!" Mike was being silly, of course, but then when they went out to pick some vegetables from the garden at night, he sneaked around and jumped out of the garden in front of Jon and Ethan yelling "Cookies and Ice Cream!" They jumped back about 10 feet and then started laughing. Ever since then our kids have been jumping out of all sorts of places yelling "Cookies and Ice Cream!" So if you want to really scare someone this Halloween, you know just what to do. There can't be anything more frightening than Cookies and Ice Cream!

Mike took portraits of the kids recently. He has always been frustrated with how the school portraits turn out and with our digital SLR, he enjoys taking pictures. Posed portraits are more challenging than natural/candid portraits since the kids don't always want to sit or pose like we want, but the digital SLR is fast at taking pictures. Mike has a light set and has made a few backdrops. You can see instructions for making your own backdrops if you are interested. If you don't have lights or flashes, you can also get good lighting by setting up outside to take portraits. Some of the portraits are shown below.

Kirsten wanted to do some silly pictures.

Unfortunately, we haven't been taking many pictures of the things that we're doing, but here are a couple more of Keith. New baby's are always so cute!

Ethan and the other kids like holding their baby brother, but they usually can't hold him for very long before they get tired.

Haunted Houses

We enjoyed a terrific General Conference weekend! The talks were great to listen to. We really enjoyed President Monson's talk on Gratitude.

After Conference was all said and done, we made some haunted houses.

Ours didn't turn out quite like this one.







We don't recommend using this pattern. It's a bit trickier to put together than the traditional gingerbread house pattern.







The kids really enjoyed the activity, even though houses falling apart left and right was a bit stressful for the adults. Eventually we got everyone's houses together long enough for the Royal Icing to set.

Happy Grandparents Day

Happy Grandparent's Day to all you grandparents out there!

Grandparents and grandchildren,
Together they create a chain of love
Linking the past,
With the future.
The chain may lengthen,
But it will never part.
- By Unknown Author

Lena has been finding deals with coupons and codes lately through www.becentsable.net. A couple sweet deals have been cheap photo printing at Walgreens and a free photo book through Picaboo. We made a photo book of The Family: A Proclomation to the World based on a template that we heard about from Mormon Times. We had to modify the template to get it down to 20 pages to take advantage of the discount code. However, with the coupon at the time, we only had to pay for shipping. Normally, though we prefer to use blurb, which has the best pricing hands down. The book we ordered would normally have been $40, but only $32 from blurb and the shipping is cheaper as well. If interested, you can see our book here.

Alyssa got her first hair cut about a week ago. Of course, it was just a small trim. Mike had quite the time trying to get her picture afterward, since she kept changing where she wanted to sit while he took the picture.

Lena had gotten some coordinating outfits for the girls at a sale. Last Sunday, we took them outside to get a picture of them all together. It's not too hard to get pictures of the kids while they are busy doing something, but getting them to pose for group and family pictures is extremely challenging. They keep moving, looking all over the place (except at the camera), and making silly faces.
We went to an open house at the school this week. Our kids are all doing really well and the teachers and staff kept commenting on what good kids we have. Naturally, we were very pleased to see that they are all doing really well. The kids all love to read and read regularly from the scriptures, which I think has helped advance their reading a good bit.