Happy Halloween!

2nd Annual Spooky Dinner!

We had a really fun time tonight with my family for the 2nd annual Spooky Dinner hosted by my parents. There was all kinds of fun spooky food:

My dad went to town on the pumpkin cookies with an edible black marker; each one had a unique design!

mummy dogs

(these are pumpkin-shaped bread bowls, which we filled with corn chicken chowder - yum!)

All of my siblings & their families were there, along with both of my grandmas.

Here are ALL 12 B* cousins below, decked out in a wide variety of costumes!

Back row, L-R: Ninja Noah, Cleopatra Lucy, Spider Countess Zoe, Narnia Snow Witch Brooklyn, Elastigirl Presley, Scarlet O'Hara Molly, Nacho Libre Tyson (so awesome)

Front row: Princess Paige, Fairy Witch Keeton, Dinosaur Crew, Witch Allie, Ramses Sam.

It was a fun night and a great get-together with all the family!

Scouts!

Noah's now an "11-year-old Scout" which means he gets to start going on some of the campouts with the big scouts! This weekend he went on the first campout he's ever been on without either of his own parents present. He was excited; as he told a friend, "I'm excited to go without my dad because that means I get to do everything myself!" He set up a tent with his buddy and he was anxious to tell his sisters when he got home how many matches he lit over the course of the 24-hour adventure. I'm sure every one of those matches was struck for a good reason...

Fall Break Pictures

I found a few pictures that I took during fall break at a fun picnic & games day at the park with friends. It was a little too warm that day, but nice in the shade. We had a great time.

What's new around here

Last week the kids had Fall Break; it was a nice break from school for them, and it was fun for me to have them around. We spent one whole day thoroughly cleaning the house; the kids did a great job helping me and they worked all day long for the promise of a DQ Blizzard and their own pack of gum. On Thursday afternoon of that week Aaron's parents came to visit, and they stayed until Sunday morning. We didn't really have any fun stuff planned, and the weather got too hot to really do much outside, so we ended up playing a LOT of games while they were here, such as:

Wii Sports
MarioKart
Balderdash
Sorry
Clue
Monkey-in-the-Middle
Catch
Golf ball putting into a cup
Missionary Tag
Charades
Plants vs. Zombies

Tom & Ruth took the boat with them when they left; it's time for it to go back up to Utah but it's not really running right now so I'm not sure if we'll ever end up having it back here again. Aaron has worked on it for the past two summers; now the Utah relatives will see what they can do with it. We hope it can be fixed!!

So, now the kids are back in school and our schedule is back to "normal."

A few newsy items:

We got a new trash can for our kitchen; the kind that's battery-operated and the lids pops open when you gently kick a little thing on the bottom, then closes by itself (not by gravity) when you're done with it. Everyone around here thinks it's the coolest thing ever, and it's nice that the dog can't get into the trash anymore. (yes, this is news.)

Our ice maker (in the freezer) has been kaput for a while and Aaron just installed a new one! Yippee! Ice, ice, for everyone! The kids each go to bed with a cup of crushed ice so everyone is excited about this development.

Noah and Molly have email accounts set up on their own logins on my computer. They've been having lots of fun sending & receiving emails to & from mom & dad, and each other. Noah's out to learn the shortcuts to all the symbols; for example alt+3 = ♥, alt+5 = ♣, alt+129 = ü, and alt+127 = ⌂. You know, useful stuff like that.

One final piece of news which is actually over a month old now -- Aaron got a new job! August was an emotional month, with the two of us agonizing over the decision of whether or he should change jobs. But, so far so good. He's been very busy; these first few months will be hectic with studying for some certifications and working on some extra projects, but he is enjoying the challenge and we are so grateful that he has a job.

That about brings us up to date ~ the next post will have pictures I promise!

21st Century Kids

Here's Molly, studying online for a spelling test. SpellingCity.com is saying the words to her (hence her headphones), and she's typing them and then it tells whether or not she spelled them correctly.

Noah loves logging on to "Virtual Classroom" which has become a standard part of sixth grade life. He can find out about assignments, have access to textbooks and other resources, and they have the "virtual backpack" option where they can work on an assignment (say, a writing assignment), save it as a text file to their virtual backpack online, and access it at school the next day to work on it further during class or print it out to turn in.

Also, Noah is learning some computer programming from his dad. So far he's built two simple websites (not online) and a calculator. He loves it!

It's funny to look back at when I was about Noah's age and we had one of these at our house; the height of personal computing. An Apple IIGS. We rocked the Oregon Trail, and printed stuff out on our dot matrix printer. We had those 5.25" floppy discs. This baby could even store 256K of data. Is that awesome or what!?

We ♥ the weather

This past week the high temps around here all of a sudden decided to drop from 100 to about 75. Ahhhhhh. Our poor, overworked A/C units have had a breather, as have we. It's been three straight days now of the air condtioner being turned off, and the windows open all day & night. Lovely!

This afternoon Aaron & the kids took a bike ride; one of these days I'll get a bike so I can join them. The weather couldn't have been more perfect and they had a fun time.

And they're off!
The good news is, it's done being REALLY hot for the year. The bad news is, this was just a cold front and it's going to be pretty hot for a few days next week. But, fall is still obviously here now and I am thrilled.

Fruit time!

It's been fruit season around here! In the past month I've kept busy with fruit processing. Here are the late summer/early fall 2011 totals:

Peaches: canned 18 quarts
Pears: canned 24 quarts
Raspberries: made about 13 pints of freezer jam
Strawberries: made about 21 pints of freezer jam

I only have about a dozen empty quart jars left in my pantry, which tells me that we have a lot of delicious preserved food on hand. Yay! I still have several quarts of applesauce that I made last year, and I have several quarts of chicken that I canned earlier this year. I may have to buy more jars when it's applesauce time, next month!

I don't think I've ever done strawberries this late in the year, but it's a good thing that they went on sale over the past few days because we had run out of freezer jam! I knew I hadn't made enough strawberry freezer jam in the spring, but I thought it would last us a little further into the winter. It was mutiny around here when the jam ran out and I had to BUY some jelly at the store. But, then I got a couple of flats of raspberries and made jam from them, and then over the weekend I bought a ton of strawberries on sale... 3 lbs for $1!! I bought 15 lbs on Saturday; didn't get to them until Sunday night and about half were moldy. Boo. So, I went back first thing this morning and bought 15 more pounds... at that price you can't expect them to be great quality, but I only had to throw probably about 1 lb worth of berries away from this morning's batches. This should last us until next spring, when strawberries are in season again.