A play and a day at the park

I had a couple of people ask questions about our spooky dinner, so I will just list the menu here. The white rats were deviled eggs turned upside down with cut black olives for tails and capers for noses. The creepy crawly bugs were various kinds of olives with dried rosemary legs. The eyeballs were mushrooms with a slice of black olive on top. (Sareny loves mushrooms and begs for them at the store, go figure.) The witches hats were sliced, buttered french bread toasted in the oven. The monster toes were lil smokies wrapped in half a biscuit. The monster smiles were sliced apples stuck together with peanut butter, with mini marshmallows for the teeth. I think the hit of any spooky dinner is the witches brew; here is the recipe we use:
2 cups sugar
2 quarts water
2 (0.13-ounce) envelopes lime drink mix
1 (46-ounce) can pineapple juice
1 quart ginger ale

Stir together sugar and 2 quarts water until sugar is dissolved. Stir in remaining ingredients. For a scary presentation, place punch bowl into a large plastic cauldron, and add dry ice to punch. The punch is a pretty awesome shade of green and bubbles really nicely. I should also note that we used and diet ginger ale and Splenda instead of sugar, and I thought it tasted great, although Keith claimed it had an aftertaste.

After our spooky dinner, the kids put on a rather silly play. It involved Sareny and Ema prancing around the family room singing.

Then they were locked up in a tall tower, where they sang some more.

Then Isaac, who was the prince, saved them.

Somewhere in there, Sareny's character fainted and had to be revived by Dr. Isaac. She tried to faint again, but I said she could only faint once per play. The actors taking a bow.

And the captive audience.

The next day I took the kids to the South Lake Park.

Can I just say I love this place! It is so beautiful and only two minutes from our house. Finley wore her Fancy Nancy sunglasses and looked so cute!

Sareny and Ema wanted to take pictures with my camera, but I forget which one of them took this one.

Isaac had fun on the slide, and I loved what it did to his hair.

There were people working on the grass and aerating the soil, and Finley freaked out. You can see the machine in the background, and Finley made sure she was plenty far away from it.

Isaac kept climbing on the slide and then he would stop and pose and tell me to take his picture.

Then we walked down to the edge of the lake to see the ducks.

This fluffy headed guy was my favorite.

The kids loved watching the ducks.

Then Ema took our family picture. Take one.

Take two. I decided to remove my sunglasses, which ruined this one.

Take three. I should have left my sunglasses on, because my eyes look really weird.

So looking at these pictures, I realized that while the rest of us are in various stages of awkwardness, Sareny looks perfect and cute in every one. Kind of funny.

Our Annual Spooky Dinner

Okay, all of my adoring fans, I finally got myself to the computer to make a new blog post. It has been over a month--yikes! I think a big part of the problem is that I don't like where our computer is--it is upstairs in an alcove in the hallway and I rarely get a chance to sneak away for the requisite amount of time it takes to create a post without my children running amok and destroying things downstairs in my absence. Sadly, I am not joking. But I digress.

At the beginning of October over Sareny's Fall Break from school, we had Ema over to spend the night and had a spooky dinner that night. On the menu--monster eyeballs, white rats, creepy-crawly bugs:

monster toes:

Witches hats, which got a little overdone. But the kids thought they were black on purpose, since witches hats are black:

Monster smiles:

And, of course, we had witches brew, but I didn't get a picture of that. The kids had lots of fun eating their spooky dinner. After dinner we were treated to some fine entertainment as the kids put on a play, but I think that will have to go in the next post.

Out with the old...

This past summer, on July 17th, we left our home of eight years in Phoenix and moved across town to Goodyear. It has been exciting, challenging, and a little sad at times. We are starting to feel at home here in our new home, but I wanted to document a chapter of our life that we will never forget--our home on 6419 W. Whyman Ave. I remember we got the keys to this house on 2-22-02.

My kitchen. I think my favorite thing about my kitchen was the pot rack, which we took with us and installed in our new home.

I have many happy memories in this kitchen though--meals prepared and shared with friends and family.

This is the family room, which for most of our time in this house held our couches and TV.

We spent a lot of time together in this room. It is where my children learned to crawl and walk.

The front room generally housed the ping pong table, and an unwanted assortment of toys that trickled down the stairs. For about six months before we moved, however, it held our couches and TV.

We painted this room red years ago, with plans to get some matching furniture at some point. That never happened, and when we moved our purple and green furniture in here, it didn't look so good, but we were not interested in repainting, especially considering just how many coats of red we had to put on the walls in the first place.

This was the chandelier in our entryway. The builder had no light here originally, but we had them wire it for one and then our friend Curtis Gardner came over one evening to help us hang the light from the 20 foot ceiling, with a completly inadequate and prequarious ladder situation.

The view looking down at the entryway from the loft area upstairs.

The nursery, or most recently, Finley's room. This is the room I had the hardest time leaving behind. All of my babies have lived in this room when they were little, and I remember when Keith and Curtis painted it and Brandon Slinker helped with the chairrail to get it all ready for our babygirl Sareny Agnes.

I rocked all of my little babies to sleep in this room, and the night before we moved, I brought each child in and rocked them one last time in this room.

Isaac's bedroom, which we painted just last September/October.

Sareny's girly room, which we finished painting last August the weekend before she started Kindergarten.

I think she was a little bit sad to leave her cute room behind.

The loft, or toy room. Had a couple of orange accent walls.

Our master bedroom. I remember painting this room when Sareny was a baby, and trying to steal moments to paint when she wasn't screaming her head off. Cuz let's face it, if she was awake, she was screaming her head off. Other things to note about my room--The dresser and nightstand were my mom and dad's from when they were first married. They were originally a garish 70's wood color, but we painted them white and added the knobs, and I thought they looked like something you would get at pottery barn. The painting on the wall of the Las Vegas temple was done by my high school Algebra teacher.

I also have had a difficult time leaving our finished backyard. I loved having a swingset and grass, and it is hard to have just dirt and rocks right now.

Our back patio. We added the uncovered part before Sareny turned two.

I loved watching the ash tree in the corner getting bigger. The dead spot in the lawn is from our bounce house which we left set up there for too long...

This house had a pretty big side yard, which was really nice. At times I had a little garden area to the left of what shows in the picture.

And that was pretty much our house. When we were showing it to the lady who is renting it right now, she seemed to really like it, especially the backyard and the painted walls. She asked more than once, "And why are you-all moving?" It was kind of gratifying to have someone else appreciate a space that you tried to fix up and take good care of.

I did love this home, and just looking at all these pictures is making me feel a little bit homesick for it right now. However, I really love our new home and neighborhood, and we are excited to be getting settled in here. I'll post some pictures of our new home soon. And by the way, I think you can tell from this post that I am just a little bit sentimental. It's just part of who I am.

I like Bountiful Baskets

I have been doing bountiful baskets for a couple of months, a food co-op thing, and have really been happy with it. It costs $15 to get a basket, and then you go pick up your produce at the designated place and time. You never know what you are going to get, and sometimes there have been some interesting items in it. (Like the "Holy Bok-choy, Batman!" week.) This picture shows what was in our basket last time--I thought it was a pretty decent assortment.
Anyway, I would say this has definitely helped our family get more of our daily fruits and veggies in!

How we've been spending our free time

One of the awesome features of our neighborhood is the fantastic waterpark we get to use just because we live here.

Our kids have gotten to be really good swimmers this summer. Before we moved here, Isaac had the basic skills and movements down, but was not able to actually move himself through the water. The very week we moved in, he put it all together and figured it out.

Now he is really good, and can even take breaths and keep going.



He is also really good at floating.

Lately Finley is trying to take off too, so I'm guessing she'll be swimming by next summer.

Sareny loves to meet her good friend Emily at the pool--they have so much fun together!

I like that the pool has a ledge that goes around the outside edge, it is perfect for Finley to play on.

We love the zero-depth entry play area too.

We generally steer clear when the giant bucket is ready to dump.

Here is Sareny coming off the slide. We like to have races to see who comes out first.

And that is basically how we spent our summer.