Photo flop

Right now I should be attending a photo workshop held at the local library, but it was cancelled and I am seriously bummed. It's a bummer not just because I enjoy anything photography related, but because I have been stuck at home with sick kids all week and I was really looking forward to spending time out of the house. I actually drove all the way to the library, finding out after I arrived that it had been cancelled. After leaving the library I did briefly consider heading somewhere else but didn't know where to go. I don't know why I didn't just stay at the library and hang out because I love to read but I wasn't really in the mood.
You know how you are all psyched up to go somewhere or do something and then when it doesn't happen, it kind of takes you a little while to move onto something else? That's where I am at right now. Back at home everyone has settled into their own groove. Thing Two is watching a movie, and Thing One is half watching a movie and half playing a game on the laptop. Hubby is putting new brakes on my car. I love having a handy man around the house. I think he is probably saving us a bunch of money on labor costs right now by taking on this project himself.
So I am just kinda floating around at the moment, trying to find my groove again. There are plenty of things I could be doing-laundry, vacuuming, or emptying the dishwasher.
I also have seen 1,452 cute craft projects I'd like to try.
And then there is Thing Two's birthday coming up in a week and I have things to do to get ready for that...
Not to mention that it is Halloween and we will be trick or treating later on...
And the Bruins are on TV this afternoon, so there are plenty of choices.
Now I just have to decide.

Cannibalistic Pumpkin

I can't let the kids have all the fun carving pumpkins so here's mine


Run away! Run away!

Halloween Yum!

I made these cupcakes as a last minute treat for Dom to take to work because I thought they were so cute. I of course saved some for us, too! I discovered them on a blog called http://www.ourbestbites.com/ . They are candy corn cupcakes. The photos on the blog are better than mine but you get the idea. The cake batter is tinted yellow and orange and topped off with the white frosting to look like a candy corn. On the blog they topped them off with an actual candy corn. I could not find candy corn and substituted candy corn kisses instead. If you like to cook and bake you should check out this blog-lots of yummy stuff!

Pumpkin Guts

You can't carve pumpkins without dealing with pumpkin guts. Luckily, Rebecca loves pumpkin guts. She spent a good twenty minutes playing with the guts, creating a story with her sister and making wonderful sound effects. Just another occasion for me to wonder why I waste my money on toys when there are things like pumpkin guts to play with.

This is also about the time that little voice in my head starts complaining about the mess they're making. Luckily I am really good at tuning that voice out and just letting them enjoy themselves. In reality it wasn't that bad, as they kept most of the guts in the bowl and after the pumpkins were all carved we got to roast the pumpkin seeds which are of course yummy!

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Halloween Craftin'

Here are some things I've been working on. I have accidently deleted my craft blog so the craftiness will be here until I decide wether to do another one or not.

This is my table center piece. Flowers are fake. Little creatures are paper. The base is a Create in a Vase I found at Ben Franklin. Very cool as it has an insert you can decorate any way you want and use it over and over again. They come in two sizes and would be really cool to decorate with pictures. You cannot burn candles in them. Partylite does make something similar which you can burn real candles in.
I just put some tissue paper in the vase for this.






This is what it looks like disassembled. The smaller round piece fits inside the larger one creating a little space to put decorations of anything that will fit. then the little silvery piece fits on top. These also came in a larger size that was about twice as tall.







These are just some jars of different sizes covered in tissue paper or crepe paper. Added some cute faces and stuck some white lights inside so that they glow.




These are Halloween S'mores. 1 quart jar,1 sleeve of graham crackers crushed,1/3 cup of brown sugar, peeps and 1 1/2 cups of M&Ms. To bake-empty contents of jar, snip peeps into little pieces mix together with 1/2 cup melted butter and 1 tsp. vanilla. Pat into a greased 8x8 baking dish and bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Cool and cut into bars. Or you can leave the peeps whole and just lay them on top of the mixture. Remember to include the baking directions if you give these as gifts!





Here is sign I made to hang between the kitchen and living room, though once I hung it up I realized I should have made it two-sided.

Toast anyone?

Anyone up for toast cooked just for you in my handy-dandy toaster oven?

No? How about toasted rubber snake or halloween peeps or magnets??

Just asking because that is what is currently in my toaster oven. Just one of the joys of motherhood, You never know what suprises you might find. I am glad I don't have boys because it would probably have been a real snake in there!
Mr. rubber snake is a leftover from Becca's Indiana Jones party last year which reminds me of all the little plastic spiders I had all over the house for the party. I would randomly find them scattered all over the floor weeks later and at first they would freak me out a little. Then I just got used to it and would pick them up and throw them away. No biggie until the day I went to pick one of the spiders up and it moved!
Yes, it was actually a real spider and it scared the living daylights out of me.

Just edited this post as I found this on the stove several hours later. The fun never stops...

More Apples

Saturday we headed to my folks house to pick apples for ourselves and for Dom's mom and aunt. This time I got to spend time taking pictures and watch Dom pick most of the apples. I think the girls spent more time running around then picking apples too!

This is the typical "maybe if I make a funny face mom won't take my picture" face. Doesn't work. I just file these under pictures to show future boyfriends.

Tween attitude. We dealt with a lot of that this weekend. I can't wait til she's a teenager...

Notice the ominous clouds in the sky. And how everyone watches daddy do all the work. Becca did hold the basket for a little while. Kenzie learned not to stand directly under the tree or you can get beaned off the head by a falling apple.

This is Dom in the tree before he remembered about the handy dandy picker. He kinda has a look on his face like "how do I get down with my hands full?" The girls were supposed to be waiting to take the apples from him but they kept running away. This may have been because of the random apples that kept falling on their heads...

And Kenzie stretching for the perfect apple.

Field Trip

Today I got a chance to chaperone a field trip for Mackenzie's class. We went apple picking at Applecrest Farms in New Hampton. It was lots of fun and luckily the rain held off!

We got to get a tour of how they make cider, we got to learn how important bees are, we got a hayride, we ate cider and donuts and we of course got to pick apples! We will be enjoying more apple picking adventures tomorrow, this time as a family, at Grammie and Grampies house!

A Taste of Fall

The cooler weather always makes me want to bake so I decided to make an apple pie. I do not bake pies that often and didn't have a recipe so I did a little hunting online, found a basic recipe and tweaked it just a bit. And I cheated and used the store bought pillsbury crusts. I've always heard the crust is the hardest part of making a pie so if I can get a decent one at the store and not stress about it why not? But someday I'm going to try making the crust from scratch.

I made homemade vanilla ice cream to go with it too. And since I had already crossed the quadruple digit calorie mark I added cool whip too. I love cool whip especially now that it comes in a can. MMM..tastes just like fall.

Snack Attack

It seems everytime I turn around this kid is in the fridge or on the counter scrounging for something to eat.
Mackenzie is what some might refer to as a grazer. She eats a little of this and a little of that throughout the day. I am not complaining as most of what she eats is fairly good stuff and she is not nearly as picky as her sister. In fact most of the time I find it quite amusing, especially since she' s nothing but a pint of peanuts.(she has yet to break the 40 pound mark)!
The good thing is that she does appreciate good food and is always willing to help out in the kitchen.

The same but different??

The girls have decided what they want to be for Halloween and I sat down today to order them online. (What they want to be will remain a secret until I can bribe them into posing for pictures. ) They had chosen some from a catalog I received in the mail so what could be easier? Little did I know it was going to be harder then I thought. I had actually received two catalogs in the mail, one several weeks ago and one about a week ago. At first glance I thought they were the same company. Both had the same special deal on the front.... and both had the same coupons on the back. And the costumes inside were all the same. Though one catalog featured more adult costumes than kids costumes.

So I just grabbed one of the catalogs and went to the website listed and put in my order. Everything was fine until I tried to use the discount code on the back of the other catalog. They looked the same so no biggie, right? Wrong! It wouldn't work! After a little frustration I realized that the web address was not the same for both catalogs and was finally able to get the girls costumes ordered with a discount. I am still a little confused and not completely convinced they are two seperate companies, despite the different websites, and yes the websites did look different but still had the same costumes. I imagine this is some kind of clever marketing tool but to me it was just confusing!

Little Artist

Becca has always enjoyed drawing and I would say her skills were normal for her age. That was until this past summer when she spent almost every free moment drawing. She went online and taught herself to draw. And this past week on a trip to the library she took out five books. All about drawing! I think she has improved enormously and I am a proud mom. Her favorite thing to draw is animals, especially dragons but the picture of the horse above is one of my favorites.

Fun Guy

Okay, bad play on words with the title. It should actually be Fungi, but Fun guy has so much more appeal, right? I think mushrooms are kinda cute and interesting to look at and to photograph especially when you get right down to their level. Plus then don't complain about me taking their picture and that is always a plus in my book. Not that anyone I know would ever complain...

So here are few pictures of some of the mushrooms growing in the yard. No, I do not know what kind they. I attempted looking them up but there are so many kinds of mushrooms that it got a little daunting. Please feel free to tell me what they are if you know!

I do believe that the first picture and this one is called an alcohol inky.

And this one I think would make a perfect little umbrella for a fairy!

Spooky Spiders

Kenzie and I made these spooky spiders to decorate the house for Halloween. The idea came from Family Fun magazine. They are pretty simple to make and super cute, uh I mean spooky.

First we cut up some egg cartons and used a hole punch to punch two holes in the front for the eyes and four holes on each side for the legs. Next we painted them.

Once the paint was dry we added the legs. I cut one pipe cleaner in half to form two legs. I just poked them through the holes on the sides and taped them. The bottom of the spider is a battery powered tea light. The ones I got were white so I just wrapped black electrical tape around them to make it black. Next use the tape to tape the egg cup to the top of the tea light so the little bulb is now inside your spider. Now just bend the legs how you want them and turn on the tea light to light up your spiders eyes!

Cat Curiosity

I am always amazed at how the cat seems to appear out of thin air everytime I open a can of tuna. How does she know? I think if we had an electric can opener I could understand her hearing that noise but it's just a little hand held and I don't think it makes that much noise, but she just seems to know.

She also has a habit of disappearing when we have company and then reappearing as soon as they are gone. I imagine that has something to do with the noise level of the house. I have in fact, had more than one person remark that they didn't even know we had a cat because they have never seen her. I had a cat growing up that did the exact same thing.

And yeah, the cat gets on the counter, and the table. I don't like it but she didn't do it until we got Boomer who likes to chase her and eat her food. It took her awhile to learn that if she doesn't run he won't chase her. Now she rubs up against him and he just looks confused!

I think she is my favorite cat out of all the cats I've had growing up. She was a stray we adopted from a shelter. They had named her Misty and we decided to keep that as a name. That was after I asked Rebecca, who was two at the time, what she wanted to name the cat. She looked around at the toys on the ground and answered "Bucket!"

I picked her out from a picture online because she had double paws and was only about a year old. She had been brought into the shelter with her litter of kittens. Most of the kittens were quickly adopted except two that were not quite normal. They couldn't walk straight and may have had cerebral palsy. (possibly due to the fact that Misty was so young and may have had an infection while pregnant) They were nicknamed "the bobbles" and I was happy to learn that not long after we adopted Misty they too, found a home.

Anyway she is a such a good cat. She is friendly and gets along well with the kids and the dog. I couldn't ask for a better cat!

Clearing out

It was 38 degrees outside when I got up this morning. Fall is definitely in the air today. I love the cool crisp air, the colorful leaves and no bugs! The cooler weather also makes me want to bake and craft. But before I can get back into crafting mode I have to find my desk which has spent most of the summer buried under a pile of books and papers. Of course having a messy desk doesn't always stop me from crafting, I of course just move to another area of the house but that means dragging all my stuff upstairs and then dragging it all back down when I am done. Not fun. So I decided to clean it up. Here is a picture mid-process. Please notice that the desk is clean, The floor is another story. And just for the record not all the mess on the floor is mine, though I will of course be the one to clean it all up.
Please also notice the black blob in the lower right hand corner. That is the dog who will insist on trying to fit in that little space with me while attempt to clean.