Halloween week o'fun

With four kids Halloween becomes a rather busy and eventful time of the year. We run around trying to put together the perfect outfits that fit our kids personalities and they love being lost in the magic of becoming someone else for a few hours.  One thing I do love is instead of wearing their costumes for a few hours one night they got to don their new identities to a few different parties. 

First up was our Matty. We knew months ago we wanted him to be Yoda and found him the perfect costume at a local store. He was a trooper on getting on his outfit and leaving on his head piece. He also brought oohs and ahhs from everyone who saw him. 

 The other kids also showed their geek personas. Laine was princess Leia, with an awesome wig to boot. Eve pulled out her inner Hermione Granger. And one costume James wore was is Harry Potter Quidditch gear. With all this Star Wars and Harry Potter love going around I admit now that I have raised my children to be geeks.

 I only made two costumes this year. Christian's and mine. Keeping with the Star Wars theme I made us some awesome Jedi robes. Then painted some glow in the dark light sabers!

 Keep your hands off ladies, this man is mine.

 We had a Bradley family party on Saturday night. The kids enjoyed our spooky treats and we enjoyed their awesome costumes.

 The next night we went to the Bellamy Halloween party, also full of spooky treats.

The cousins got together for pictures there too.

Now some of you may have noticed that James has switched costumes. Gone is Harry Potter and he has been replaced by an Evil Sith.  See, James couldn't decide what costume he wanted this year so his Virginia mom sent him two..lucky boy. That way he changed back and forth on what he wore to various parties. I don't think a five year old could ask for anything more.

Matty decided that two Halloween parties was enough and decided to crash on mom and dad's bed, shirtless. 

The next night we craved our pumpkins. The rule this year was that you had to be able to carry your own pumpkin and you had to clean it out.

Matty of course could carry his pumpkin, but Dad cleaned it and carved it. he was a very sad boy with a very happy pumpkin.

 This was the first year James had to clean his own pumpkin. He wanted the wartiest pumpkin he could find. I ended up carving it for him, after he outlined it for me.

Laine decided to make hers a Frankenstein, she gutted it and cleaned it herself.

 And Eve's pumpkin was rotten inside. She was a trooper though and still cleaned it out on her own. Then she carved it and found it amusing that you could see the rot through her pumpkin's mouth.

 Our final bit of Halloween fun actually happened on Halloween day. We started the day with some Halloween Parades at school.  James once again donned his Harry Potter costume, complete with broom. Matty and I even got some trick or treating done at our weekly trip to the library.

During the evening we went trick or treating in the neighborhood with cousins and James as Darth Vadar again. Christian and I ended up carrying four light sabers, Matty's candy bag, and Matty while the other kids raced from house to house. There was even a time where we sent one group home to drop off the candy while the rest of us continued with empty bags, only to quickly find them full again.

It was a fun holiday and I think Matty is going to go through withdraws tomorrow when he realizes that the magical time  where people just give you candy is over.

Fall fun

I feel like I blinked and October was half over. We have been having fun this month though. Matty is jabbering and loves to run around. He also thinks the Halloween decorations we have up are awesome.   James is adjusting well at school and he and I spend time daily doing his homework, the best was when we had a ten minute argument on how his middle name was spelled and once he admitted that his dad and I were right he then insisted that it had a capital B in the middle of it.  Eve is one of the top in her class at school and has mastered both her subtraction and addition facts, next up-multiplication. Laine is doing great in school. She has read all the pages and genre of books she needs to and just needs to complete three more hours of service to receive the gold level prize in her class. We couldn't be prouder of all of them. 

Also this month...

We've had Craft Night with the Bellamy cousins...

 Played on Grammy and Poppa's roof with the cousins...

 Celebrated Uncle Zach's birthday (oh and Lu's birthday and Uncle Bart's birthday)

 Laine and I went to mother-daughter book club. Where after discussing Sprinkles and Secrets Laine made a very sparkly cupcake purse.

 We were also happy to see that the Millcreek Park finally reopened and we've decided that we love it and the kids would like to go every day.

With Halloween around the corner we are looking forward to more fun and shenanigans!  

Matty is 15 months

Our Matty turned 15 months last week and a cuter friendlier tyke you will never meet. He is keeping his  parents busy with his ever growing vocabulary. Right now he has mamma, dada, blue, book, boo, mail, cracker, quack quack, no, yeah,  and the other coos, yells, and sounds that come out of his mouth. He talks nonstop most days.  He is comprehension is also growing. He amazed the doctor during his check up while the doctor talked about reading Matty pulled his books out of my purse. He can show you when asked where he sleeps, eats, bathes, and where dad works.

He is super friendly too. Church is his favorite time because he can make new friends. I am just grateful the other church goers seem to find him a charmer and don't mind when he will come talk to them during meetings and lessons. He also loves to play with the curtains  in the Relief Society room. He thinks that they are loads of fun and I am just grateful he is not strong enough to pull them down.

He runs amok at all other times. he loves opening and closing drawers, of course he only closes them once he has emptied them of their contents. He likes to watch Blues Clues during the day and I have found that it is a great way for me to get the bathrooms cleaned or take a shower. His favorite part is Mail time and he can be heard yelling Mail with Steve and Blue.  He also loves to read books, play with balls, and push anything with buttons. Oh his other favorite past time...pulling out items from the recycling bin. I find water bottles, paper towel rolls, and cereal boxes in various locales in the house.

He is a happy kid, though we do have the occasional temper tantrum.

He is still a small chap. He now weighs in at 21.6 pounds (10th percentile!) and  is 30 inches long (18th percentile!). His head though is staying nice and average he is in the 45th precentile there. We did have a major victory a few weeks ago though. We finally packed up all his nine month clothes and put them away. He is now in his 12 month clothes.

He is a bright spot in all of our days and we couldn't ask for happier sweeter child.

Bradleys do Idaho

We had a fun adventure this past week. We packed up the kids in the car and drove them to Idaho  to spend the weekend with our friends, The Frosts. The Frosts are fabulous people who Christian has known for about 15 years. They are wonderful caring people and were so happy to host us and let us spend some time in their fabulous cabin. 

We left Salt Lake Thursday afternoon and rocked out to some Broadway and  rock on our way up. James of course covered his ears, he believes the only good music comes from his toy car. We finally made it to the Frost's home where Christian and John were able to go spend some quality time watching other men blow things up and Marta and I were able to sit around and talk while Marta did some crafting. 

The next morning we loaded up the Frost's trailer and we were on our way to the cabin! 

Their cabin is in McCall, Idaho about two hours outside of Boise. It was beautiful and sat right on the golf course.   Matty was right at home and showed off his new trick, climbing on the fire place hearth. 

Once we unloaded the trailer and the men set up the new pool table we piled everyone back in the cars and went to get dinner. We went to a fabulous place called the Pancake house. With six kids at the table it was a very loud dinner and I chuckled a bit when they put us in a corner far away from the rest of the customers. Christian and I shared two different dinners, I really liked the hot pasta salad they had. It was fabulous and with honey mustard dressing was even better. John then introduced us to the biggest sweet roll I have ever seen...

We ordered three and ate two...It still looks like a giant cow pie.

My kids were just happy to be out of the car and were more than happy to pose for pictures after we fed them the giant sweet roll.

Saturday we had a lazy morning then drove up to Burdorf Hot Springs. The kids had a great time playing in the warm water and the adults thought it was pretty fun too.

So funny little side story. I had forgotten Matty's swim diaper back at the cabin and bought one from the nice man at the hot spring. When I put it on Matty I thought it looked more diaperish than anything else but I had watched him pull it out of a swim diaper pack so I just figured it was a different brand...yeah not so much. It was a plain old regular diaper that weighed about as much as Matty does by the end of our stay. The diaper had exploded and Christian and I spent a fair amount of time wiping Matty, ourselves, and the table clean of the lovely gooey crystal substance that is found in diapers.

We drove back to McCall and walked around the downtown area. It was so nice and pleasant  We tried to stop for ice cream at Ice Cream Alley (which by the way is down an alley) but they had closed for the season. We did get to enjoy ice cream from another shop though...we cleaned them out of mint chocolate chip.  But James seemed to prefer the chocolate.













Then we took a walk by the lake and snapped a few pictures of course.

During our walk we found the 1930 McCall Jail. I lovely two bedroom abode where your family had to bring you your meals.  The kids thought it was a fun place to pretend they were in jail.

We finished out our night roasting by the fire side. The kids just wanted to throw sticks on the fire and played most the night out there. They seemed to like to pick up long sticks with one end on fire...yeah I don't get the fascination there.

The men roasted our sausages to perfection...they later did the same thing with marshmallows.

Once the kids were in bed our evenings were filled with games, cookies, and sparkling cider. Yes children, your parents have lots of fun once you are in bed. It was also filled with great conversation. We are very lucky to have such great friends who we can sit and laugh with.

Sunday morning we hurried and cleaned up and helped Laine get in her service hours. She told me as we backed the car out to leave Thursday she had to turn three of them in on Monday. A few of the kids were sad to leave their new friends. Laine thought Oliver was great because, "he got my jokes." and they were on board with Oliver's plan that we buy the house next store. We did finally hit the road though.  Eight hours made for a long trip back but the kids were good. They also liked seeing the Idaho state capitol, and the Boise State stadium. They also enjoyed listening to the children's version of The Odyssey and were sad when we told them that there wasn't time to do another book so they would have to listen to Les Mis instead.  We made it home though, all limbs attached and very few tears shed.

Thanks for the awesome weekend Frost Family! Let's do it again soon!