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The ghosts of Halloweens past.

I know I have said it before and I'll probably say it a couple more hundred times this week, but I love Halloween. It is one of my favorite holidays. I am just a big dork that likes to have a reason to dress up. I was looking through pictures and thought I'd share with you some of the ghosts of Halloweens past so have yourself a chuckle and enjoy!

Step aside Martha Stuart

So this week I have gotten this wild hair to cook.

There is something about cold weather that gives me the itch.

Sunshine and I made up some Halloween cut out cookies. She is really getting into this cooking thing.




Then this weekend I got a big box of tomatoes, some fresh herbs and garlic and decided I was going to make up a ton of pasta sauce and can it.

And I did. It was lovely.



I also made up a batch of fresh pesto, applesauce bread and I am currently drying a gad of bananas.

What comes next you may ask? Only time will tell.

Somebody help me. I may have a problem
:)

Whoops.

So I got these little Hershey kiss type candies that aren't so much chocolate, but pumpkin spice flavor. They are delightful and I highly recommend them. But I had this great thought to make up some shortbread cookies and put them in the center. In my head they sounded delicious.

So I found a good shortbread recipe and off I went to create the greatest cookie that was ever made. Little did I really think this through because I made them, baked them and it was not until I pulled the pan out of the oven that I cracked myself up and realized that I had just made a pan of nipple cookies.


Clearly I didn't really think it though or recognize it's likeness until I pulled them out of the oven. But I had myself a little laugh and then sent my husband a picture with no story attached to it. Just the picture. His first response was...what the heck are you doing?!! I then explained what I had done and we had a giggle about it.



If you are wondering, they were really good too. To eat I mean.

Push it to 11!!

So Bug has been having to do these daily accountability reports at school. You are on a point system with 6 being the best you can do each day. Usually he gets anywhere from a 3 to a 5. Anything over a 4 is considered meeting his daily goals and is a good day. Well yesterday he came home beaming because he managed to get a 6 for the whole day. We all but threw a parade in his honor. He was pretty stoked.As were we.

When I dropped him off this morning we talked about yesterday's report and how great would it be to get a 6 two days in a row. He hopped out of the van and shouted back.."Don't you worry!! I will be so awesome they will have to give me a 7!!"

It cracked me up and made me think of this scene from Spinal tap.

Great gosh O' mighty!!

Ok in our experience when it rains it pours. That is if a day starts going south, everything else goes down with the ship.

Rockstar husband had a friend of his that does MMA (which is sort of like boxing, mixed with wrestling) and he had a big fight yesterday. I knew about it and so he was going to be gone most of the day. Big deal, I am alone most of the time with the kids anyway, so it was no big deal. Of course we had no idea what kind of day it would unfold to be.

It started out with me canning up the last of the pears that I picked from my in law's tree in their backyard. They were perfectly ripe and so the day had come to get them in jars before they went over ripe. So I spent the morning skinning and cleaning them up. I set my canning kettle on to boil. It is a gigantic pot that takes about 45 minutes to bring it to a boil. I turned it on and sort of forget about it. I went out to the garage to see if I had any more wide mouthed jars. Next thing I know there is pandemonium in the kitchen. It turns out there was a piece of paper or something that had fallen into the burner and had now not only caught fire, but set off the smoke alarm filling the house with smoke. I come running in with the kids jumping around and freaking out and the smoke alarm screaming at me. There were flames shooting from the burner. I blew them out and now we just had a house full of smoke. We opened all of the windows and it cleared out. No harm done.Although it left a giant black burned ring on my stove top. Fantastic.

So then I moved on to my next project. While the pears were going through their heat process, I thought I would try to get some Ebay done.Peanut slept through the whole smoke alarm fiasco so I wanted to get a couple more things done while I had this window of opportunity. I was just getting into a groove when I hear Sunshine in hysterics running toward me with her pants around her ankles. It turns out she managed to overflow the toilet and water was cascading all over the bathroom. It took 6 giant beach towels to clean up the mess.Also 4 rolls of toilet paper (that were in a basket on the floor) were sacrificed in this process. Just as I was cleaning up this mess, my canning kettle started to boil over once again setting off the smoke alarm. It was like a comedy of errors.

Then it started getting late in the afternoon so I started to get dinner underway. I made up some penne pasta with homemade sauce. I threw in some basil that I had grown and a whole multitude of spices. My kids naturally turned up their noses and would only eat it if there was parm on top. At this point I was tired of fighting, so I just threw some parm on it to get it down their gullet. I sat them down to eat and everyone was doing fine, so I thought I would go out and get the mail while everyone was mellow. I couldn't have been outside for more than 3 minutes when I come inside and it was like the bad news bears were running wild through my family room. There was penne noodles stuck on the walls. There was sauce on the TV screen. (Yes we were eating in front of the TV, just save your hate mail, I don't want to hear it)Peanut was rubbing his hair with a parm,red sauce mixture. It was like something out of a movie. Needless to say, Libby (the dog) was having a hay day with all of the food flying about. The second I walked into the room everyone froze. Fists full of food waiting to be hurled.

I would love to say that I handled myself in a calm and mature way,not loosing my cool. But if you know me, well, that is not how it went down. Tears were shed and a reluctant cleaning crew was constructed.

Once the clean up was done, Sunshine and Bug went upstairs to play. I could hear them over the monitors getting rowdy and I called up a couple times to settle down, but somehow my voice always seems to fall on deaf ears. Within minutes I hear a crash and Bug comes flying down the stairs in a panic fever screaming "I didn't do anything!! Don't listen to her!!" Then I see Sunshine stagger down the stairs sobbing and bleeding from her face somewhere. It turns out she split her lip because Bug threw a toy at her.It took almost 15 minutes to get her to settle down just to pull that bit of information out of her.

Just as I was cleaning her up and trying to get her to calm down, Rockstar walks in the door.

Chaos a flyin.

"Wow, what did I miss?" He says.

"Well ....lets see, we lit the kitchen on fire, flooded the bathroom ,had a fierce food fight and now Sunshine is now bleeding out the mouth. Ehh, not much."

Roloff farm

So as I may have mentioned before, we can't seem to get enough of TLC, The Discovery channel and A&E. We're just nerdy like that. We are all about the mythbusters,the how it's made, John and Kate plus eight, Dog the bounty hunter and of course, Little people big world. If you haven't seen this show before you really should because it is awesome and I need someone to share in my own personal addiction.

Well Little people big world follows a family of little people through their day to day lives. But they live here in the Portland area and have their family pumpkin farm. So with fall upon us, we thought we would go out there and get our pumpkins this year.

They have a really cool 20 acre farm with all kinds of cool stuff that they have built on the property such as a tribeuche (sort of like a catapult), a western town, a pirate ship and a castle.

I even got to meet and get my picture taken with Pop and Honey. (Matt Roloff's parents)They were really nice.



It was a great day. We took a tractor tour of the farm and then picked out our pumpkins. We had a lot of fun. My only complaint is that they did not sell REAL apple cider. All they had was packet stuff. No cider? DENIED!!

Deep thoughts by Jaxon

Ok so I know my life is a seemingly endless supply of random events and thought. I am one of those freak deep thinkers that can ponder the dumbest things at any given time. It drives my husband nuts. It never fails. He will be trying to fall asleep when I come up with some stupid thing that has been plaguing me. Like should people who are deaf and use sign language be able to play charades? It just seems like they would have an unfair advantage. Or what is the exact make up of a peach pit? It feels like wood. Is it? Or what is it that allows cats to be able to purr? They have almost identical organs as dogs, but dogs can't purr. What is that about?

Seriously.

There may be something wrong with me.

I can't seem to help myself. On top of that I can't seem to keep these thoughts to myself. Thank goodness for the internet or I would be a mess :) I actually have a notebook that I started when I was in middle school of questions I plan on asking God when I get to Heaven. It turns out my parents grew tired of answering my stupid questions too.

Well in the true spirit of my natural curiosity, it should come as no surprise that I love to people watch.It is seriously one of my weirdest pastimes. When I was a kid I spent hours in airports by myself just watching people come and go, say good-byes and reunite. It was a weird little window into people's lives. I would see couples run to each other with flowers and embrace and I would see mothers put their kids on an airplane and cry as the plane pulled away from the gate. People do all sorts of weird things when they think nobody is watching. I to this day have a bizarre love of airports because of my strange childhood in an airport. The smell of recycled air is really comforting.

My fascination with people has brought me back to the mall. I spent my late teens and the better part of my twenties working in a mall. So it should surprise no one that I am back again mainly for the sociology study. I am working at a Tupperware kiosk. I don't get paid a dime, but I do get sales credit for everything I sell there. So in short, on a good night I might make $20. I won't see that money for at least a month, maybe longer. I however am not there for the money by any means. I am there because I can work at night when the kids are in bed, and I get uninterrupted time to gawk at all the weirdos that walk the mall. Also, I have the chance to read a book that doesn't have pictures. And I get to talk to new people.

I started working there about 9 months ago and I immediately started bringing a notebook to jot down all the observation about the people I saw.I wanted to remember all the stories so that I could share them with my husband when I got home. I thought I would start sharing them with all 4 of you that read my blog.

1.)*Parents carrying a (what looks to be)4 year old twins through the mall. Note-they also still have binkies.

Ok look, I had kids that did the binkie thing. I know it is hard to break the habit, but they are too old to be walking around in public with a binkie in. At least keep it hidden as the dark "mommy secret" that it can be. Now as for carrying two four year old kids through the mall....those kids are playing you. They can walk on their own. Quit trying to keep them babies and just let them grow up to be kids. Not eternal babies.


2.)*I am really glad I am no longer a teenager. Both boys and girls do really obnoxious things to get each others attention.

I felt like Jane Goodall observing the mating/courting rituals of the North American teenager.

3.)*Why do women insist on wearing white pumps after Labor day?!!

Ok I don't mean to go all serial mom here, but ladies, c'mon!! Style has not changed!! It's tacky. Your mother would be ashamed because you KNOW she taught you better.

4.)* Emo style is throwing off my Gay-dar.

For those of you who don't know what Emo is, it is sort of that punk inspired fashion that all the kids are sporting. The boys and girls are beginning to get harder to tell apart. Look, I am all for changing fashion, I'm not so old that I don't remember what it was like to rebel with what you wear just to get your parents goat. But seriously guys, I have some pretty fine tuned gay-dar. I can usually tell what side you bread is buttered within the first couple of glances. It's a gift. But it throws me off when I see the boys with the crazy "pretty hair" and the eye make-up. It's like a cell phone in an airplane. My navigation devices get all nutty.



I do have much, much more, but I think I will save it for another post. I could go on and on. People are weird. But interesting.

Making cookies with Sunshine

So it has been rainy and crummy all afternoon and really cold all of a sudden. It felt like a good cookie making day. Sunshine has been under my feet most of the day trying to "help me". So I decided I would let her help me make up some cookies. I had a mean craving for some peanut butter cookies, so that is what we made.

She pulled out her little Tupperware bake set (shameless I know) and made a batch all by herself.

 

I helped her with the mixer only because it has 2 speeds. Warp speed and Mach 5. It is a nice mixer, but it would tear a finger off if given the chance.Although she didn't seem to mind not being able to use it so long as she got to lick the beaters.

 

She couldn't handle just putting them in and walking away. She proudly watched her batch and see her little criss cross cookies cook.

 

Then just when watching the cookies bake in the oven got boring, she took on the thrilling job of making sure the timer was working. Turns out it is.

 

Nothing too thrilling, just a little slice of my life today.

I never thought this day would come....

So with some cooler weather and the start of school, we had the first illness creep it's way through our house. First it was Sunshine, then Bug started to get it. Then last but always the worst, Peanut got it. Poor little Peanut with his asthmatic lungs just can't handle the common cold very well without it really bothering him. So tonight we had to drag out the old nebulizer that has been dormant for most of the summer. We were sort of dreading it because the last couple of times we used it, he really fought us on it. He didn't want to sit in our lap and take the medicine. He got so worked up that the event of a treatment was almost as bad as the actual asthma attack.

So when we heard him wheezing this afternoon, we started to get that little bit of panic of what we should do. We knew that we needed to give him his treatment, but that it probably wouldn't be pleasant. So we got all situated and both Rockstar and I in place to fight the good fight and hold him down kicking and screaming if we had to.

We fired up the nebulizer and he just grabbed it and decided he was fine with the whole idea of it, as long as he got to do it himself. So he sat there and held his own nebulizer just like a big kid. We also had a spare mask for his bear "Boo Boo". That helped and kept him occupied. I don't know why I didn't think of the "I do it myself" idea sooner.

 

Funny thing is, he knew exactly what to do. We have done these treatments hundreds of times before (sadly, that really isn't an exaggerated number) so aside from doing his own dosing, he just hopped right up there and breathed deeply for a 10 minute treatment.

I guess I never really saw an end in sight of not having to sit down and help him with these. It never occurred to me that the day would come when he no longer needed my assistance.

Ok I am now going to go and cry on my big pillow.

:(