A Homemade Christmas

As I mentioned above the past 2 weeks has been fairly crazy at our house. After all those class reports were done and my prep for Preschool this week was done I wanted to get ahead start on some homemade Christmas gifts. I knew I wouldn't be able to get much done this week or next (as far as my Christmas gifts are concerned). I'm pleased with all that I was able to accomplish in so little time. This week the big kiddo's have been getting out of school at 1:15 everyday for parent teacher conferences. I lost my afternoons to those and then also my mornings by it being my week of preschool. Next week there in no Preschool which means I can't work on anything or Miss Emily might spoil the suprise. Hunter and Madelyn only have school on Mon. and Tue. anyways and then there out for Thanksgiving. My 1st gift I wanted to work on was for Miss Emily. After months of some serious BEGGING, ASKING, WHINNING,PROMISING TO DO ANYTHING, CRYING for some baby doll diapers

I finally got around to them. She doesn't know that though as just yesterday at WalMart she asked me to buy her baby dolls a box of diapers like I was buying for Brayden.

Um.....No!

It was a little tricky but hopefully these diapers will fit all her babies. Big and small.

I can hardly wait to see her surprise when she opens this gift.

My last sewing project that I wanted to accomplish last week was for my niece who is 6. Knowing how much she loves to draw, write doodle and color, I made her this. During the school supply sale I was able to pick up composition books for just $.25, boxes of markers and colored pencils for under $.50. My 1st thought was just to wrap everything up and give it to her but then after seeing something similar to this on a TON of blogs out there I decided to follow the crowd. Seriously I'd be surprised if you haven't seen these yet. I made a fabric book cover for the composition book and then a matching crayon roll (only made mine bigger to hold markers and colored pencils).

I absolutely LOVE the way everything turned out. My two girls also loved it. Since the completed project almost everyday Madelyn will mention how much she too LOVED it and would also like one for Christmas.

After hearing (non stop) how LOVED this gift was going to be I made two more for my girls. I recently got a new wallet and purse and was going to throw away my old well beaten up planner. Emily asked if she could have it for a little while. I didn't care, but seriously that thing as been connected to her hip ever since. It is not uncommon to see her sitting on the couch writing on the previously used (by me) papers. I hope I transfered all my contacts as I don't think I could read anything anymore. I'm glad my girls LOVED this. It certainly made an easy and inexpensive Christmas gift for them.

And one that I know they will enjoy!

Milestone

Another milestone has been reached.

The baby boy has turned 18 months and is officially in Nursery!

Redilicious

Yesterday Maddie brought home something a little different for her homework.

Meet Tom the turkey. The homework assignment was to disguise dear Tom so that he would escape Thanksgiving dinner. To Maddie this was not a homework assignment but a "project" just waiting to happen. Around this house one child can not do a project without everyone else joining in also. So we made a few copies of dear old Tom.
I must say Hunter had a clever idea. Being Halloween was just last week he decided to do a halloween costume for Tom. He was going to curl short pieces of black pipe cleaners and attach them to the eye lid but in the end changed his mind. Instead he added fuzzy's.

Emily was was apparently going after the "starry eyed" turkey.

Maddie was very proud of her final project. Have you read the books Pinkalicious, Purplicious or even Goldilicous? I didn't have all pink, all purple or all gold fabric so she chose red instead.
And so this is how Redilicous came to be.

If you couldn't tell, she "love it". She did a great job and really did most of it by herself. She just needed me sitting next to her agreeing with her ideas.

Good Job Madelyn!

Trick or Treat

Those of you who know me know my passion for Halloween. I LOVE this holiday!

I love everything about it. For the past 4 years we have had an annual Halloween Party. Living in my parents basement, not having a lot of room and not knowing what the weather would really be like and of course not knowing a lot of people we decided not to this year. I should have done one anyways. I really missed not doing one. Oh well next year for sure.

We were able to go to the Elder's Quorum party held at the church. Kory and I were the Ghost Buster's.

I've been working for several days on our costumes and I thing they turned out great. I loved our costumes this year. We usually don't do the same costume every year. I guess we are like our kids and want to do someting "new". My sister Sheri has already called dibs on our costumes for next year. We'll share! These were such a hit though we'll have to use them again, sometime in the future. At our only party we got to attend we won the most "overall" halloween costume this year.
Brayden was our ghost.
Emily decided to be a witch for the night.
Mommy with my little man spider.

My ghost!

My brother and his family came along with us.

It was a good party with lots of food, sugar cookie decorating for the kids and plent of visiting.

I think what I like about Halloween the most is all the creativity you can have with it. The thinking up and then creating the homemade costumes. It was much easier when my kids were younger and there was only 1 or 2 of them to do there's too . Now having 4 kids that come with there own opinions and the changing of there minds so quickly I just can't do homeade for all. But at least I can use my creativity on Kory's and mine costume. I know I've said it but I'm going to say it again. I absolutely loved our costumes this year. I don't know how I will be able to one up ourselves next year.

School Parties

I found another picture of a Spider Web hairdo I did on Maddie but never blogged about.

She loved this one.What's a web without spiders? I personally think we over did it with the spiders but it wasn't my hair and I did what I was asked. So the spiders she had!
Emily had her Halloween Party during preschool thursday morning.
She was dressed as a Care Bear ans seriously 2 minutes before we were to leave she got mad at me for something and refused to wear a costume. This girl is stubborn! I'm afraid of what we have enstore when she's a teenager.

After spending several minutes explaining to her that she would be the ONLY one not dressed up. That every friend of hers and her teacher would have a costume on she decided whe wanted to be Tinkerbell.
And so we quickly created a Tinkerbell costume. Not one of her pictures has her eyes open.
Oh well!
I was not very good about taking my kids pictures while in their costumes this year.
Maddie was Wonder Woman with using a borrowed costume this year.
She loved it.

Hunter could have been a Ninja or a Pirate. He had an AWSOME fully loaded costume for both. But nope he didn't want to be those. He wanted to be the hand me down spider that could have really used a face lift. But.... deciding to be the spider the morning of his class party not much could be done.

It must not have been as bad as I thought it was as he received so many compliments on it. Or maybe it was becuase he was one of the few with a homemade costume.

I am Hunter's room mom this year. We had a great party. Lots of games, cupcakes to decorate and getting everyones costumes in place for the school parade.

Halloween Meals

Why just do Halloween Dinners?

That's what my kids wanted to know.

So I suprised them the next morning with a "one eyed egg" breakfast.

Instead of doing the normal circle I used some of our Halloween cookie cutters. One night for dinner to go along with our main course we had Frankenstein join us.

This was the 1st time we've made these.

The kids loved it. I will have to do these again next year. I tried making little rice ghosts but.....didn't much look like ghosts. After a family vote we decided they were Fall Owls. Not quite Halloween but still fun and something different.

For Halloween night we had "Ghost Pie" aka Shephard's Pie.

Several mornings we also had pumpkin and ghost shaped pancakes but I must have forgotten to take pictures of them. What a crazy Halloween week we ended up having. Doing our traditional Halloween Dinners were fun but next year I am most definetly going back to the once a week Halloween Dinner.

Halloween is one of my most FAVORITE holidays.

I love the school parties, the dressing up, fun dinners, the outside decor. Especially come Halloween night I love the creepy looking houses with the strobe lights and fog.

I just love it all!

I'm a little sad that Halloween has come and gone already. However, I do love the holidays. I am ready to take down everything Halloweeny and put up our Fall/Thanksgiving decor.

Monster Toes and Project #3

Tonights Dinner was some good ole' tasting monster toes and french fries.

I sliced the potatos while the kids took some of our Haloween cookie cutters to them.

We had homemade frenchfries in all different shapes, a moon, coffin, bat and spider. The monster toes were sliced pieces of chicken breast rolled in bread crumbs with a slice of red pepper and then baked

Yummy!

The kids claim tonights dinner as the best so far.

The dinners this week have been fun to do but very time consuming and I'm definetly going back to the "Halloween Dinner" once a week through the month of October next year.

I'm glad there enjoying all my hard work trying to make this week memorable for them.

I sure hope they remember these times when they're older.

After dinner tonight we did project #3. We ended up eating later than I had planned and so didn't have time to do our carmel apples. Instead I pulled out our games we will be using for Hunter's class party this week. We all helped put them together.

Some a little more than others. Brayden enjoyed his siblings sitting with there back towards him. Your never safe from him if your on the ground at his level. This baby boy of ours loves to tackle!

I think his big sisters and brothers love it just as much as he does.

After the stickers were all in place we played Pumpkin Bowling and Candy Corn Toss.

Hunter's class will definetly enjoy these games.

Thanks for your help my little ones!

Mummy for Dinner

Last night for dinner I made a yummy "mummy" meatloaf.

Along with brittle finger tips dipped in ranch.
After dinner we were going to make carmel apples for our family project, but....
I had a very disobedient little boy who couldn't seem to listen or do what was asked and so
he got sent to bed early. Not wanting to be quite "that" mean I decided to wait on the project for another day. Maybe tommorrow....

My little man, Brayden seems to get hungry every night about 8:30. This little boy eats and eats and eats. He eats a good breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack and dinner. I'm telling you though come 8:30 he eats more at that time then he does all day. Being he usually sleeps all night I don't mind to much. Last night was no different. He started whining and beating on the fridge for someone to come help him open it. Daddy came to the rescue, he pointed to the milk so Kory got the milk out and went to get a cup. When he turned around Brayden was pulling a box of cereal out of the cabinet. It wasn't a drink of milk he wanted but a bowl of cereal.


It was just a few minutes into his bowl of cereal that I realized his head wasnt bobbing to get the spoon into his mouth but becuase the poor kid was falling asleep.
Everytime the flash went off his eyes would open to just a slit and you could see his eyes rolling back into his head. Way "Creeepy"!

I wish I could have gotten it on video cause it was HILARIOUS to watch him bob and sway.

Being he sits at the table in a normal chair I didn't feel like I could let him bob to much or he'd fall off. Needless to say his cereal didn't get finished but he still slept good!

Project #2

One of our families Halloween's traditions is for mom to make a fun Halloweeny meal once a week through the month of October. I decided to mix things up a little bit this year and instead of doing a meal once a week (which I've decided is much easier) I'd do one every night for about a week before Halloween.

For our 1st Haunting meal the kids and I made breadstick bones.

We had all sorts of shapes and sizes. We tried making a breadstick look like a severed finger/monster toe but those didn't turn out very well. They raised too much and ended up looking like an Easter Egg the kids decided.

OOPS! Wrong holiday.To go along with our Haunting Meal, I turned the mashed potato's into friendly green eyed ghost's.I LOVE the smiles and enjoyment I get from my kids over the simple things in life.
Once you get the creative side of the brain rolling it's easy to turn everday meals into a fun, festive, haunting meal. One that the whole family enjoys.

After dinner we continued with our 2nd project of our craft week.

We carved our pumpkins!

Madelyn earned a 100% on her spelling test last week and got a gift certificate to our local grocery store for one free pumpkin.

She was on cloud nine to be able to go to the grocery store by herself with me and to pick her very own pumpkin.

The kids glanced through our idea books, each picked a picture and then mom and dad helped the older 3 carve there pumpkins.Emily and Brayden seem to disapear lately when I remember to pull the camera out.
They really were participants with this activity too.

The final projects!

Hunter helped do the skeleton, Madelyn the scary jack-o-lantern and Emily the Ghost saying Boo!

Project Week

One of the blogs that I enjoy following, the mom along with all her followers dedicated last week "Week of Projects with your kids" week. Every day these moms did something "projecty" with their kids. They didn't do all the same things, it was left up to each mom to come up with something for there own family. I loved the idea. Last week being our Fabulous Friday I was a little busy preparing for that so I planned our "project week" for this upcoming week. My kids are so excited knowing they get to do a project with mom every day this week. I wanted to document our progress so I'll be better prepared next time I want to do something like this. Yesterday we started off...

Our 1st project of the week was making a "Cookie in a jar" for there school teachers.

I pulled out some Halloween scrapbook paper and stickers and let the kids get creative. When the decorating was done the kids followed the recipe and put all the dry ingredients into the jars.
The finished project!
Good job! You guys did great.

Despite their looks they really did have a good time. They were so excited to get to school this morning to give it to their teachers.

Don't they look like twins. Same facial expressions too!

Halloween Do's

Last week I stumbled across another AWSOME mom that loves to create and do different hair do's for her daughter. We are really enjoying her Halloween Do's. Madelyn comes home from school wanting to look at "that other mom's blog" to see what new hair do she did that day. Maddie loves the stuff we put in her hair.

Monday we didn't have school so we didn't do anything fancy. However for Tuesday Maddie wanted to adorn her hair with creepy crawlies.

She loved her hair so much including the boys from school that we did her hair this way on Wednesday and Thursday too.


By Friday mommy talked her into doing something else. Being a little rushed for time we settled for a skeleton.

We've been doing Emily's hair right along with her big sisters. I just didn't take any pictures of her's I guess. We'll have to change that for this week. We are making some more fun bows today to go along with this coming weeks Halloween hair do's!

If you have a little girl and want to do something fun check this website out...

http://princesspiggies.blogspot.com/

Conference Weekend

A few weeks ago we had the opportuntiy to watch General Conference. During one of the talks I didn't notice that my 1 year old had gone MIA. In our pantry is were I keep a 25lb bag of flour, 25lb bag of sugar and a 25lb bag of powder sugar. All of these bags once opened do NOT seal close again. To keep them shut I use a clippie which USUALLY works well. But not when I have a 1 year old.
Little stinker here wasn't discovered until he came giggling out of the pantry to throw white powder at his parents who were sitting on the couch. He had white powder ALL over including himself.

Making messes is hard work. I found him fast asleep on grandma's rocking chair.

Elena (my niece) and Brayden are becoming the best of friends. We often find them giveing each other "loves".

However, sometimes my little man can be a litle over powering.

Maddie's lost a tooth....

About 2 weeks ago Miss Madelyn came to me so so so excited. She had her 1st loose tooth. She has been asking when she was going to have a loose tooth since Hunter lost his 1st tooth a few weeks ago. She was pretty bummed that I kept telling her it might not be until she was in 2nd grade just like Hunter. But to our amazement it didn't take that long.

Last week Madelyn thought her tooth was loose enough to pull out. She was begging me to help her pull it out. We grabbed some floss, tied it around and she started to pull.

She pulled and she pulled
and she PULLED!
But to no avail that tooth just wouldn't come out.

Talk about frusturation! Eventually she gave up. We took the floss off and told her we'd give it a few more days and try again.

This past Monday Madelyn came home from school so excited. Her tooth fell out at recess! She said that while she was playing tag she bit her teeth together and she felt it pop. She was thrilled she didn't loose it in the grass.

Monday after the kids got home from school our family headed to Cedar City to see some family friends. We ate dinner, had family home evening together and Kory using a borrowed skid steer was able to help finish some landscaping. The entire drive to Cedar, the whole night we were there and all the way home she talked about the tooth fairy. Before we left she put her tooth under her pillow. She wanted to know if the tooth fairy would have already come. I told her no, she had to be asleep 1st. Well....she fell asleep on the drive to Cedar did that count? Ummm sorry but no. But Moooomm, I haven't been home for hours maybe she came cause I'm not home. I again told her that it had to be night time and she had to be asleep on her bed.

I don't know how it happened. I really don't. With all the talk about the toothfairy I don't know how I FORGOT! My only excuse is we didn't get home until after 10, by the time I got the kids to bed and the house picked up a bit it was way way way past my bedtime. The next morning I woke up before everyone with the stomach flu. It was about 6 am and I was in the bathroom puking my guts out when I heard Madelyn standing behind me trying to talk to me. I kept telling her "just a minute" as I continued to puke. When I was able to control myself for a moment I hear her say that the tooth fairy hadn't come.
CRAP!!!!
Again, how did I forget that? I asked her to give me just a moment and I'd come help her look for it for surely the tooth fairy did come. I asked her to go pick out her clothes for the day while I washed my face. As soon as she left the bathroom I ran to our room fumbling in our coin can for 2 quarters. I grabbed them and went to find my disapointed girl. Emily was no longer lying on her pillow but Madelyn's. I had Madelyn climb on her bed and lift up that pillow. Nope no money. I then picked up Emily while leaving something behind and put her back on her own pillow. Madelyn lifted her pillow up and there in the dark you could see the outline of her 2 quarters. With a huge smile on her face I left her be to run back to the toilet I ended up hovering all day.

A few minutes later she came to find me, I was puking AGAIN as she starts shoving her new money into my face. She wanted to know what one of the quarters was. Being so sick without even looking at it I sent her to find her dad for help.

OOPS!
The toothfairy must have gone to Australia that night. Madelyn was given a quarter and a $1 coin from Australia. She was thrilled until she learned it wasn't worth a dollar here. Kory offered to swap her a dollar of US quarters for the dollar from Austalia. She thought it was a great deal. After all it was. What was suppose to be a $.50 prize ended up being $1.25.

What makes this story even better is that when Hunter heard the tooth fairy had come he ran upstairs and with Grandma's help, being mom was to sick, tied a string around his 2nd loose tooth, he then tied the other end to the door and slammed it.

That night before he went to bed he made sure his tooth was under his pillow. When he woke up that next morning he let everyone know that the tooth fairy "jipped" him. How you might ask? To myself I was thinking at least she had remembered to come. Because she only brought him $.50 and Maddie got $1.25
Kids!