Halloween Party Time

Paxton (Indiana Jones), Parker (Skull biker) & me (hippie)
My dad's bday is on Oct. 27th. Uncle Leo's is Oct. 28th so these last few years we have made it a tradition between our 2 families to have a halloween (birthday) party. Leo & Judy are great to host the event out at their fun house (in their big garage.) The garage is decorated with halloween decor & halloween music is playing in the background (Monster Mash, Ghostbusters.) To top it off the company is great and everyone dresses up.

The 3rd cousins
This is how the festivities usually go down. First we start with a dinner of homemade soups, chili, and bread sticks. Follow that up with lots of yummy desserts, and Uncle Leo's homemade root beer.

After dinner we play a few games. This year's games were drawing a jack-o-lantern on a brown paper bag. The catch was you had to do this while the bag was over your head, and before time was up! The kids then voted for their favorite pumpkin pic (Shar won.) The kids played a game where they each had a straw and had to use it to blow their spider over the finish line first.

Next we had Halloween crafts! What is halloween without a craft? So the kids created cute little spider suckers, and made spiders out of ding dongs, licorce, frosting & red hots!

Aunt Judy acted like Martha Stewart as she showed everyone how to put their spider sucker together, it was so funny!


Then came the favorite part of the night for all the kids......the spook alley! (I remember last year Paxton LOVED all the scary masks Uncle Leo would go into his basement to put on. Well he loved it all night & everyone got a kick out of how much he liked this scary stuff. In the middle of the night he woke up screaming bloody murder from a nightmare he had. I had to laugh.) This year the spook alley was in their extra garage. It was filled with masks, fog, scary noises, and a strobe light. Is there anything better than scaring the crap out of your children? I'm not sure there is, especially when they love it and look forward to it every year!!! As the kids got to the last monster they figured it was pretend like the rest were, but this one was Uncle Leo! So he would jump up and the kids would scream. It was great!

At the end of the night we enjoyed singing Happy Birthday to the two birthday brothers, and eating cake.

(Poppy - dressed as Alfalfa from Little Rascals & Uncle Leo - is he a great nutty professor or what?)
Thanks Leo & Judy for hosting yet another great halloween bash - you guys are great!!!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

I got this in an email tonight. I don't want to offend anyone "butt" it was too funny to not post and share. Thanks Abbie - it "cracked" me up!!! Ha ha

Frightmares FUN at Lagoon

On Saturday the weather was beautiful so we headed up to Lagoon with Brian, Morgan & Madi &

met up with the Gregory's to go to Frightmares at Lagoon. (Isn't the pink hearse great? I had to get a pic of it.)

Everyone else had the same idea we had since the day was so nice so it was crowded but we had a BLAST! By looking at these pictures you are going to think that Paxton is the favorite child.....well what ended up happening is all the older kids (Morgan, Madi, Shaye & Parker) went with Todd on the big rides for a lot of the time, while the younger ones (Savannah, Paxton & Braxton) stayed with me, Brian & Deb in the kiddie area. So I only have pictures of Paxton enjoying the rides.

Because of Halloween they have great halloween decorations up around the park & they have Frightmares "shows" going on. The performers are all dressed up - like Frankenstein- (he was GREAT! Looked a lot like Ben Stiller), werewolves, mummies, vampires (LOVED the vampires) & do a 15 min show where they sing & dance. Those were a lot of fun to watch, esp the Hackenslash group - AKA the masked guys with the chain saws. This one is Slash - Paxton & Brian's favorite.

Each of them have wild hair & their name on the back of their jumpsuit. They never talk - just walk around the park starting up their chain saws and scaring people. The kids weren't scared & they were really nice to pose for pictures. (Personally I liked Buzz. He had some cool, wolverine looking hair going on.) After seeing them perform I am quite sure if these "guys" were to take off their masks we'd find quite a few females behind the masks.

Paxton loved this ride - it's like a mini version of the rocket, but for the little kids.

We stayed until closing (11pm) & will have to do this one again next year since we didn't get to see/do all the halloween things they had there (like the trick or treat alley or Pioneer Village.) The month of October has been a lot of fun for us filled with corn mazes, scarecrow festivals, haunted houses & Frightmares. Up next.....some halloween costume parties!!!

Scarecrow Festival

The kids had fall break this past week (so no school on Thurs and Fri) so we headed to the Scarecrow Festival at Thanksgiving Point on Thursday afternoon.

The boys had a lot of fun with Brian playing on the inflatable bouncy slides, jumping in the bounce houses, climbing the rock wall, going on the bungee trampolines, launching rockets & playing games.

They even had a haunted house for the kids to go through which they got a kick out of.

I think we will have to hit up the festival again next year since we had such a good time!

Lost in the Cat's Butt

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago but am a little late. It's corn maze season & here are Dylan, Madi, Paxton & myself at a fun maze up in South Jordan with Brian. (The maze was in the shape of a witch with her black cat, cauldron & moon.) We had a map to follow to get through the maze & took this picture we figure somewhere in the black cat's butt. (Yes, we were then able to find our way out of this hole.) We had a good time together. Dylan kept picking ears of corn off their stalks, then he'd unwrap them & say all surprised like "it's CORN!" Then 2 seconds later he'd grab another, unwrap it & lo & behold was surprised to see it was yet another piece of corn. This continued through a dozen or so ears, it was funny. We are lucky we didn't get fined or kicked out since the maze did have some rules we found ourselves breaking, oops.

Picture Tag

(Brooke - don't be mad at me, I haven't done your tag yet. I am just having a hard time coming up with 6 random things about me. Everything is so boring about me so even the 4 I've come up have not been blog worthy. :)

This is a fun (& different & EASY) tag. It's the 6th picture in the 6th folder of the 'My Pictures' directory. Ironic that it was my "Halloween stuff" folder (since this is the month of October.) This is Halloween 2005. Parker & Paxton were ready to go to the ward trunk or treat. Parker was a ninja and Paxton a cute monkey.

Now I tag Hillarie, Susie, Sandra, Amy, Heather & Abbie (and of course anyone else that wants to do this can.)

Parker's Soccer Season

Yesterday was Parker's last soccer game of the fall season.

He's enjoyed playing on our neighbor Heather's soccer team, the Shooters, this year. I have always felt Parker has great athletic ability, he just hasn't been motivated to try too hard. Instead he preferred to visit with others & be a social butterfly. Well this year I noticed a change in him as he cares a lot more & is working harder to concentrate on the game.

He played goalie some of the time and did well at that blocking almost every shot the other team tried to make except 1 or 2.

He also scored quite a few goals this season for the team (last game he got 3 of the 6 goals and last night he scored 4 goals! Can't remember any stats from earlier games.)

I'm not too good at taking pics & snapped this one as the ball went into the goal. Not a very good pic (and shows his principal's foot/flip flop in the pic as well.)

Yay Shooters!

This Kid "Cracks" Me Up

I think every parent has (or should have) blackmail pics of their kids. You know, the pics of the child naked in the tub when they were younger or lying naked on a bearskin rug, etc. The pictures they later on pull out to show your 1st date or serious boy/girlfriend. :)

So when your kid puts his underwear on backwards and gets a wedgie and poses for you, you gotta take advantage and click a pic or two for posterity's sake. (Paxton of course will deny he ever posed for this later on in life but at the time he thought it was funny that he had done something mom thought was funny and was willing to pose for the camera.)

On another note every day Paxton is saying something to make me laugh. Yesterday he got upset at the neighbor girl for talking to him while he was playing a video game. I was trying to explain to him to be nice & that she just wanted to talk to him, and he said "mom, I was trying to consensate." (AKA concentrate.) I know I need to write these things down more often because of the cute way he says things and the funny thoughts he comes up with.