A 50s Halloween

We have a couple of Russell's cousins and their families who are in our ward and that we love to hang out with.  I had the idea this year to have all of us dress from the 50s for Halloween.  All the girls wore poodle skirts and all the guys were greasers.  I had not dressed up for Halloween in I think 11 years and I had SO much fun.  We went to our church "trunk-or-treat" the day before Halloween where all the kids go from car to car to trick or treat. Here is our family all dressed up.

And the girls giving some attitude

Nathan being cute with his hair all slicked back

 Here are the 3 little girls (Madylin, Riley, and Morgan)

 Best picture I go of my 3.  Nathan would NOT hold still

 What made the night really fun was that we decorated the truck with a diner theme and the 3 of us mommies served root beer floats to the trick-or-treaters.  We spent several hours the night before on this juke box that hardly got noticed (but hey- the 3 of us girls had a ball making it with lots of good-natured criticism, sarcasm, and laughs into the wee hours of the night) and we played a cd through the car of 50s music that I put together with lots of great songs like Yakety Yak and Hound Dog, and Rockin' Robin to a name a few. We were singing along while scooping ice cream and having a ball even though we were too busy to even look up at to who we were serving.

Here are the 3 ladies that put it together with our precious juke box. 

We changed the names of the songs on the box to incorporate our kids' names.  

We had: 

Rockin' Riley

Nathan Angel

Braden B. Goode

Wake Up Little Mady

Morgan Sue

Luke Potion No. 9

And here's the whole gang with our ribbon we won for our "trunk."  Time to start planning for next year!

Pumpkin Patch 2010

 I am involved in a preschool co-op with some friends and the first 7 weeks I have been teaching. The last day of my unit we took our first class field trip down to Yucaipa to the Live Oak Pumpkin Path.  We had a good time and the weather was beautiful!

Madylin

Morgan

Nathan

 The only other groups there were big school groups, but all the rides were closed.  The John Deere quads were just sitting there unused so the kids had fun sitting on those pretending to drive.

Madylin and Casey

 See that flag rope behind the kids?  Yeah we weren't supposed to go past that, but we honestly didn't even think about it. Everything was closed so we just let the kids sit on the rides and didn't even think twice about it, but we got in trouble for that. Sheesh such bad examples for our children.

   Here's the whole class.  (Madylin, Morgan, Riley, Casey, and Caiden)

 This was their favorite part.  Christy and I carted the group out to the pumpkin fields in these wagons.

All the kids including the younger siblings.  Aren't they cute?

Photo Shoot Part 2

Here are the fabulous shots of just the kids.  Seriously there are so many that I love it is hard to choose a few!

Family Photo Shoot

A couple of weeks ago my old college roommate/teammate who is a wonderful friend and a fabulous photographer took family pictures for us.  She took over 500 photos!!  And then I went through and narrowed it down to my favorites.  Um . . . yeah . . . I still have 157 favorites!!  Okay but here are some of my very very favorites of the whole family and me and Russell with the kids (the kids individual and group pictures will come in another post because this is too long already!)

Labor Day Weekend

Labor Day weekend we went to visit my parents in San Diego and we planned to make our one and only trip of the Summer to the beach.  Wouldn't you know it? The marine layer was really thick when we got there at 10am and did NOT wear off AT ALL.  So it was pretty cold, but at least it wasn't crowded!  Russell spent a lot of time with the girls walking into the water

and promptly running back out with the tide

Nathan also spent some time running away from the water.  But he was very cool and collected about it and seemed to be showing everyone that he wasn't really afraid of the water, he just would rather stay dry.

The girls had SOOOO much fun it made me wish we had taken them more this Summer.

Nathan spent most of the time with me . . . up on the blanket. . . out of the cold.  I was trying to protect him from the cold water and it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was feverishly reading The Hunger Games

Nathan thought he was a big help when the girls decided to start collecting rocks.  I thought it was pretty cute.

We had a good time.  Well, at least THEY did.  These faces say it all . . .

After lunch and naps the kids had some fun in the pool with their cousins Sara and Kaleb and their Uncle Matt

A Bit of Summer

I have so much catching up to do to finish posting about our Summer.

We didn't do much swimming this year, but we did hang out with cousins and their water toys.  On this particular day Jessica called and invited us over to play with the slip 'n slide and kiddie pool.  It was bright and sunny out with clouds far off in the distance when I accepted the invitation, but by the time we got ready it looked like this

And then the thunder and lightning started.  We sat out in our lawn chairs with our kids in their bathing suits playing in the water and watched the lightning in the distance (don't worry it was pretty far away).  It was actually pretty fun and we even got sprinkled on a bit, but it was so warm that the kids sure didn't mind. Nathan and Braden had a ball crawling around on the slip 'n slide

Morgan and Madylin played in the wagon a lot with Riley and they all took turns pulling each other around

This summer we've also been working on our back yard.  We got a whole lot a dirt dumped on our driveway which we then had to transfer to the back yard.  The girls were a BIG help, as you can see.