Baby's First Feeding

Tonight Samuel was acting extra hungry and he is now almost 5 months old so I decided to give his first rice cereal feeding a try. He was cracking me up so I had to get some video. Abby did the recording since I was doing the feeding so it may be a little bouncy but I thought she did pretty good.

I hope you enjoy the video and that it brings a smile to your face as it did mine!

Saturday Chores

The only thing I hate about the fall is the falling of leaves. When you live in the forest 11 months out of the year it is pure joy. There is however one month that is more work than I care to think about. We have neglected our yard for far too many weekends and paid the price today. 3 hours later the job is pretty well done...well, "done" until next week when we will have to start all over again.

Before

After

So when I give one of you my baby to hold tomorrow at church you will know why. My arms feel like J-E-L-L-O and I am scared I might drop him. Happy raking!!!!

Come out, come out, wherever you are!

Last week while we were away someone put up two Obama campaign signs at the end of our driveway. As I mentioned before we let the boys have target practice on the signs at the primary party.
Last night we got a very odd phone call with a digitally enhanced voice and blocked caller ID telling us to go check our driveway. This is what we found.
Some of our sneaky friends are up to no good. I must say they have put quite a bit of time and effort into their pranks. The funny thing about it all is that we are not even totally anti-Obama or totally pro-McCain so we are not exactly sure what is prompting this behavior.

We got a good chuckle last night at whoever you are. We have these pranks narrowed down to a slim few....and as I warned before when you least expect it there will be paybacks!

Mother of 10 (for a night)

Last night I was the mother of 8 boys and 2 girls! My husband promised the kids in his primary class a party if they learned their articles of faith. The only trick was that they were COMPLETELY in charge of planning it. What did they plan???? What else, other than a camp out at Brother Carn's house.

To clear things up, the two girls were Abby and Morgan...his class is an all boy class. The boys had a blast! They played reverse hide and go seek, paintball involving 2 baby dolls that they had to "rescue" before getting hit and capture the flag. They also had target practice on this Obama campaign sign that was left in our yard the other night while we were away (to our sneaky friends that were involved...just wait...we will find you and pay backs are always twice the fun!). They also told scary stories that ended in the biggest scare of their lives thanks to Brother Wade who snuck up to their tent like a crazed escape convict from a mental institution!

They ate WAY too much pizza, soda, chips and s'mores. They stayed up WAY too late and woke up WAY too early. But wow was it fun. Ethan was so happy to finally have some boys around to play with. I got a little worried the other day when he asked a good friend of ours daughter when she could come over for a play date and have a makeover!!!

When it was all said and done we will have some tired kids today but I am pretty sure the boys had a great time and that good memories were made and some important friendships were strengthened which was the whole point of the party in the first place!

One thing is for sure...I would go broke if I had to feed this many boys on a daily basis!

Happy Birthday Morgan

4 things I love about Morgan on her 4th birthday:

1. I love her double dimples. Instead of two dimples one on each side she has two on one cheek and none on the other. Her nickname is double dimple and I just love them. You can kind of see them in this picture.

2. I love that she burps at every meal as loud as her father. As much as I protest I secretly think it is hysterical. I keep trying to get it on video but I have not caught it yet, but believe me you have never heard something so loud come out of someone so little.

3. I love that she spontaneously falls asleep in the oddest positions and places. Here are just a few shots of some of my most recent finds.

4. I love what a little dancer she is. If there is music playing you can bet her little bum will be shakin'!

*I love you Morgan*

Pumpkin Patch

We recently made our trip to the pumpkin patch. I seriously LOVE this time of year. Each day as I pull down my street I see all the orange, yellow and red trees and I am amazed at the beauty of where we are so blessed to live. We have spent the last few weeks enjoying parks, apple orchards, pumpkin patches and playing in the leaves in the backyard. We hope you all are enjoying your fall as much as we are!

Emergency Preparedness

Has anyone ever heard of emergency preparedness causing an actual emergency?

Let me back track a little.

A few weeks ago I attended an Enrichment Night where several women presented different outdoor cooking methods that could be used for fun or in case of an emergency if you had lost power or gas. One of the methods was an apple box oven. I had never seen anything like this before and it looked like a great thing to have on hand in case of an emergency.

So my good friend and I decided that this conference weekend would be a great chance for us to make our boxes and give it a try.

Here is a picture of the first step in covering the box with foil

Here is a shot of the completed boxes in the process of cooking our food.

This is our finished meal. Yummy chicken enchiladas and peach cobbler!! We were amazed at how quickly the food cooked and how well it turned out. It only takes about 10 coals and the food only cooked for 30-45 minutes.

So what was the emergency you may ask......

Well, after we ate our delicious meal we gave ourselves a pat on the back for learning a new skill and then went out to clean everything up and this is what we found. Yes, those are actual flames coming off of the box!

One may wonder what was under the flaming box.

Well, under the flaming box was a flaming deck...Uh oops!

So we had fun but learned a few valuable lessons. I don't think we will be cooking on the deck next time around! Don't you just love projects like this where you take one step forward and then two steps back?

I have a feeling that our next learning opportunity is going to be in deck repair :)