A Happy Thanksgiving!

We spent Thanksgiving with Paul's family in UT this weekend. Thanks to my parents who were willing to brave the snowy and icy roads we got there and back safely! Thanks for carpooling with us mom and dad! We had Thanksgiving dinner at Paul's grandparents house, so fun, so much wonderful food and tons of pie, yum yum!

We got home yesterday afternoon and as we started unloading our car it began snowing, we're so thankful we missed the snowy weather on the way home.

We are already in the Christmas spirit and decided to deck out our house, so up the tree went last night.

I love our tree, it pretty much takes up the whole front room, but it's beautiful! Paul has the great skill of 'fluffing' up the branches on our tree to make it look awesome!

See how nice and full it looks, yeah Paul's taught me a few things in tree decorating, and I'm grateful!
Yes it's a tall one. It almost touches our ceiling, it's great!

And the finished project, well almost, I need to get more lights for the top of the tree and put on the ribbon garland before it's absolutely complete, but I think it looks great!
And Paul loves it, as you can see :)


In UT we celebrated my be-lated B-day and Erik's early B-day.
We just put 3 candles on for Erik, that's enough for me too :)

Erik and I sang along with every one as we all sang Happy Birthday.

I LOVE hearing Erik sing, it's great!
Out go the candles. So do you like the cake, I decorated it!!!!

Yes, my wonderful sister-in-law taught me how to make and use fondant! We had so much fun! It was a LOT easier to make than I thought and it tasted great!

I plan to make another fondant cake solo this time and see how it turns out.
Thanks again Jamie for showing me how it's done with fondant!

Can't mention Jamie w/o bringing up Alia and Nick. We had a ton of fun with them too!

We got to talk Star Trek and play Nerts with Nick and make his cute little girl laugh.

Paul got a great grin out of her here. She loves her Uncle Paul.


Oh and she got him!

Way to go Alia, ya gotta defend yourself sometimes when your uncle is attacking your tummy :)

Paul says playing with his niece just made him more excited and prepared to have a girl. I'm happy to hear that, she'll definitely be loved.

Along with the B-day celebrating Erik got a new train set from his Grandma and Papa!

GeoTrax!


Of course they had to set it up and play with it and of course Paul had to show Erik how it's done.

I don't think Erik minded Paul doing the set up as long as he had the controls :)

Here it is racing up the track. He really loves this track, he's played with it a bunch already, which is great! Thanks Grandma and Papa!


We also conned Jamie into taking some family pictures of us. This is Erik all dressed up for the pics and getting ready to pull out the train again.

He's got this remote control thing down!

Happy Birthday Sandy!

I love my wife. Casandra is such a wonderful mother and companion. She is always so happy to serve and quick to love. Her ability to empathize with others boggles my mind. I am constantly amazed at how many people she loves and serves just with her amazing desire to get to know others and show her love for them. I'm so glad I get to spend my life with her and am happy that she will be my friend forever.
On Sandy's Birthday (November 16) we went to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. I got there early and ordered a cheesecake for Sandy, personalized just for her.

While we were eating luch Sandy asked me if I knew if they did anything for birthdays. I told her I had no idea. After we finished, the waiters/waitresses sang happy birthday and brought Sandy her treat. Sandy was very surprised and we had a good laugh after everyone had gone.

I'm so glad Sandy had fun on her birthday and that others got to see her on her day as well. She is such a great friend to so many and wouldn't want it any other way. We love you Sandy.

Fun with Treats

Erik asked for some of the last of his Halloween candy, yeah it's going pretty fast with mommy and daddy helping him eat it. He loves the smarties. When I gave him some this is what he did with them:

" A rainbow mommy!"
Yeah bud! He did this all by himself. I love seeing how creative he is!

So when I was little I remember making turkey's out of oreo's, candy corn and I think it was a malt ball. Since I've been so unsure of the exact recipe I haven't tried to make it.
My visiting teacher brought these to me today!!!

I was so excited and had a great flash back of the good times of making and eating these.

She used an oreo, chocolate frosting, a butterscotch/or peanut butter chip, candy corn and a chocolate ball.

This recipe is much easier than the one I remember because we used a smaller ball candy for the head and it was hard to get it to stick.

They were delicious!!! Just as yummy as they look. The frosting softened the cookie and it was great!

Wow I can't believe I went on for so long about a cookie, guess I just really missed these and were excited to try them again. :)

The Results We've all been Waiting for

We had a great time seeing our baby today on ultrasound. It was so fun to see this kiddo move all around. I even got to see the baby blink, soo cool!

We're having a baby GIRL!!!!!!!!

We are SO EXCITED to welcome this little gal to our family this spring, hooray for little girls!

Oh and congrats to the majority of you who voted a girl, you win all the bragging rights and we'll call you next year for some babysitting opportunities. :)

I'll post a picture soon, just wanted to update with our good news.

Last Chance

On Tuesday we find out the gender of our little bun in the oven. So I've been curious as to what my blogging friends think we'll have, boy or girl.

Here's a little photo of our baby taken a few weeks ago. Nice profile shot and we even got baby's foot in the image (it's towards the top)

So you have till Tues to guess this kiddo's gender.

The winner gets:

bragging rights,

our congratulations,

and an opportunity to babysit this child when it's born :)

Good luck to you all!

PS I have NO IDEA! I have no inclination, no hunch, no feelings one way or the other. Which is different than with Erik, I did think/feel that he would be a boy.

But with this pregnancy I'm just happy to be having a baby and we will love it no matter what!

Halloween Traditions

We've got some fun Halloween traditions we kept up on this year.

Carving pumpkins is always a favorite!

Erik got into this more this year. He wanted a scary face on one and a happy face on the other pumpkin.

He helped plan them out AND cut them out with our 'safety' kids kit.

Scared me a few times with swinging around the small carving knife from the set, yeah I took it away then.
Pawly and Erik working on the happy face pumpkin.

Another tradition, sugar cookies!
This year my sister and I got together to make a BUNCH of cookies.
Pawly, Erik and I decorated them and Erik is enjoying one of the ghost cookies in this picture.

Cookie break for Erik while Daddy's still hard at work :)

The finished Jack-o-lanterns!

And a plate of sugar, just what you need for Halloween :)

The costumes!

Erik LOVES Curious George, the book, the show, everything! So we turned him into Curious George for Halloween. Pawly was happy to be the Man with the Yellow Hat.

They are so cute and fit the part so well, don't you think?


But what's this, there are other Curious George lovers too?!?

Yes our Bishop and his daughter had the same great idea. When we discovered their costumes would be the same, we thought about changing ideas but Bishop insisted that we keep it. From then on the game was on to get the BEST Man with the Yellow Hat costume.

I'll let you judge which is the best.

I think they all look so great!


Another tradition: Trunk-o-treating!

I LOVE that our ward, and most others too, does a trunk o treat. It's so fun to see all your friends dressed up and share treats with each other.

My role/costume was the Narrator or the banana, or really the announcer of what Pawly and Erik were :)


Erik tried to be the Yellow hat man AND the George at the same time!

Silly little sugared up monkey

The haul of candy

This will feed all our sweet cravings till pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving.

maybe :)