Christmas Decorating

      For weeks, I've been wanting to pull out our Christmas CDs and hum along to Christmas carols while I happily decorate our Christmas tree.  We usually wait till Thanksgiving Day or the day after but last year we did it the night before Thanksgiving with my sister and her family who came for a lovely visit.  No such luck this year.  They have plans.  But still, it was a great excuse to put the tree up early.
    Last Thursday, I pulled the long rectangular box stuffed with our fake  Christmas tree into the livingroom but reminded myself it was probably too early to put up the tree.  So, I left it unattended in the corner.  I  walked by it at least a half a dozen times toying with the idea of  putting it up.  Maybe I would just put it up and then we could decorate it on Thanksgiving  or the  Friday after  or maybe even Wednesday.    No, I can wait.  I'm a grown woman for goodness sake!

But on Saturday, when I stopped by Food Lion low and behold look what I saw out front of the store...

Surely, it must be a sign.  If a major grocery store already has Christmas trees for sale than it's probably okay to put up our Christmas tree, right?

   

Batman Cooks

Did you know that Batman makes house calls?  He stopped by just in time to help me bake brownies and pumpkin bread for John's preschool fundraiser.

He was very polite

and excited about helping out.

As soon as he was done helping with the baking and wrapping, he had to head out in his batmobile...

While I loaded up the minivan with

these delicious brownies and fresh pumpkin bread with a walnut praline topping.

But, we couldn't help sneaking a plate over to our neighbors first.

Thank you, Batman!  I am so grateful for the super heroes and the not so super heroes in my life who help make my life a little easier and a little sweeter.

Halloween

Happy Halloween!

Halloween is a fun holiday.  Who doesn't love a holiday where you get to dress up and eat lots of candy?  While our kids love trick or treating, they weren't too excited about having to pose for pictures when they could be off knocking on doors, scoring loads of candy, and stuffing it into their sweet bellies as fast as they can.

But, they were pretty good sports about it!

Then it was off to trick or treat in the neighborhood.

Our first stop, Ms. Brenda and Mr. Joe's house. 

Have I mentioned how much I love our neighbors?

Then it was off to Ms. Carolyn and Mr. Wayne's house...

"OK everybody say trick or treat!"  Hmmm...I think Spiderman would rather be trick or treating...

He  perked right  up when I promised no more pictures for the rest of the night. 

Eeek!  I'm so far behind on posts!  Just to recap since our last post:

We attended Bella and Jackson's open house at school...

Can you guess this years theme?

Jackson got to show his teacher off

and his skeleton...

Bella showed us around her classroom

and all her great projects she has been working on.

We were super excited as you can see...

Then we had to rush over to Cardi's first middle school orchestra performance.  The kids did a great job!

We stuck around for the treats afterwards

and ran into our friend, Anna and her family!

And so we took some photos, chatted about the performance and took some more photos.

Luckily for me my friend Heidi and her husband, Dirk were there too.  The performance was sold out and so Heidi waved Jackson and Bella over to sit with her on the steps in the aisle while I snapped pictures from the back.

I've been busy painting and moving furniture.  Our neighbor's sister was getting new bedroom furniture so she gave us her old set for free!

I didn't want to spend money on paint and so I used the eggshell white paint we had left over from repainting the walls.  Heidi said it looked "country chic."  I loved how it turned out except it didn't look good on this wall.  I finally ended up painting it a chocolate brown instead which turned out nicely.  Hmmm...some how I didn't get around to taking any pictures of the final paint job.  But, I did get a picture of what our kids look like when they are bored...

Someone decided wouldn't it be fun to put on "protective" gear, climb into the stroller and roll their siblings into the chain link fence. 

Sometime in the last 2 weeks, we went to our friend's Halloween party...

Where we hobnobbed with  pirates, witches, southern bells, and the grim weeper...

They were the best pirates/hosts...THANKS, Hannah and Tommy!

The kids and I took a  trip to the auto repair shop where they were kind enough to fix our flat...

And John was kind enough to entertain Meredith and I...

And these great ladieswere kind enough to  get up bright and early on a Saturday to welcome 2 new Beehives into the Young Women's Program.

Thanks, Bianca and Carlee for helping cut out all these hearts!  I "heart" you!

Finally, on Saturday our ward had their annual Halloween Festival.  I couldn't think of a costume so at the last minute I cut out some pumpkins and pinned them on...I was a pumpkin patch and Meredith was a pumpkin...James looked cute in his letterman jacket, Jackson was a pirate and of course John was spiderman!  I didn't get any great pictures but Bella was a jack in the box...I mean Bella in the box...(She was super cute!)  and this sweet kid

decided that she wanted to be Dorothy from the "Wizard of Oz"  about an hour before the festival began.  I kept trying to convince her to be a witch again but she was so excited to be Dorothy.  She went through her closet and found a dress and then we ran to Dollar General to pick up some red paint and glitter...30 minutes later we had these...

And you know what?  I think there really is no place like home.