Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Well, I don't have significant Irish blood in me, nor am I Catholic. I have gone way overboard for St. Patrick's Day this year, though!

For snack, we had green apples and green cheese (Mozzarella shaken in a jar with green food coloring). After snack, we colored pictures of leprechauns, did a shamrock maze, and made leprechauns out of popsicle sticks and paper cut outs. For dinner? Corned beef and cabbage, green mashed potatoes, peas, green gelatin, and Irish soda bread. I also adapted a recipe for Mint Chocolate Mousse Pie for dessert.


I hope you had a happy St. Patrick's Day!

Ready to Trick or Treat!

Halloween Fun!

For Halloween this year, Kandy is a pioneer, Missy is a flapper, Sunny is Winnie the Pooh, and Buster is Tigger.

There is a lot to write about Halloween festivities! Last Saturday the girls had a Primary party and we had the Kendrick family party. Yesterday we carved the pumpkins that grew in our garden. Today there was a party at the girls' school, and tonight, of course, we will go Trick or Treating. I was going to upload photos, but there are way too many!!! I will add a few, but to see the rest, go to my Picasa Halloween Album.

They are making scary faces and posing with their pumpkins.
The dark-haired girl is our neighbor. She spends a lot of time at our house!

Ready for the Primary Party

Even I got to carve a pumpkin!
(Actually, I did most of the carving, but I got to
pick the face for this one!)

Happy Independence Day!

We had a great holiday! We worked a lot, and we played a lot.

We finished moving rooms around. I decided on Wednesday that maybe my stress level would be lower if the kids actually had a play room. With Buster napping in their room, the living room was overtaxed in its multi-purpose role. The toys were driving me bonkers. When Ben came home very early on Thursday, we started moving around. Now our old room is the play room, and despite what I said earlier, our bed is now in the office. It's a more efficient use of space, though. The office mostly had computers around the wall and toys and random stuff in the middle. I do have a hard time keeping the office clean, and kids' toys scattered across the traffic pattern did not help. Anyway, so far so good. The play room is a disaster, but looking at it brings a smile to my face because at least the toys aren't in the living room!

As for the fun, we lit off a bunch of fireworks on July 3rd. We bought sparklers for the kids, but as Ben warned them to be careful, I guess he did too good of a job! They were terrified. Ben and I had fun with them, though! We finally convinced Kandy to try it, but she still seemed like she was scared of it more than she enjoyed it.

After we finished moving stuff around on Friday, it was time to take the canoe down the Jordan! Buster and I dropped everyone else off at 1700 South and picked them up again at 400 South. They had a great time.

The real excitement happened that evening. We went to the fireworks set off from Jordan Park. As usual, we went to a little grassy area just north of there where it is much less crowded. The south winds were quite strong, and the fireworks were almost over us! We kept feeling ash drift down and saw a few hot coals drop nearby. One of the hot coals landed across the river in some dry brush and ignited a grass fire! Luckily, there were no people or structures nearby. We called 911 and the firemen came. It took them awhile to figure out how to get to the blaze, but they did finally get it out. Ben and I thought it was exciting, but Missy kept saying, "That fire was horrible!" Unfortunately, we didn't have our camera with us, so we didn't get any pictures of the fire.

Click on July 4th Album to see some great pictures from the weekend!