Happy Halloween

Our Halloween morning started off with pumpkin pancakes.Then we sent Boba Fett and Optimus off to school.

Now me and the Lil Devil are planning some Halloween hijinks!

Hope your Halloween is spookarific!

Pumpkin Carving, Check

One more thing we can check off our Family Fun Halloween Activity list!

Three Things

I am completely stealing this idea from Ali Edwards, except that her THREE THINGS series usually consists of super fantastic scrapbook paraphernalia. Mine however, will focus on three of my favorite things, which are: TV, food, and Twilight.

Time Warp: our favorite new show to Tivo and watch. They use high speed photography, then show things like water balloons breaking or mentos in coke exploding super slow. It's pretty cool, the boys in my house love it.
Chex Mix Caramel Crunch: I don't know how long this has been available, but I just barely spotted it at the grocery store last week. I will need to buy 100 cases for my food storage, it is so GOOD! I also think it would be delightful to combine it with a bag of microwave popcorn and M&M's. I also think that if you combined the first two things on this list of three things, and you did this on a Monday night, you could call that FHE. At least I would call it that!
Twilight Soundtrack: I think the entire soundtrack will be thoroughly enjoyable, but my favorite song so far is Decode by Paramore. You can hear the entire song here (you have to scroll down to the October 1, 2008 post), it is also being played on X96.

Favorite Five: Halloween Activities

With Halloween fast approaching, there are always a few things I feel like we need to do to put us in the true spirit! Here are our favorite Halloween activities.

1. Watch The Nightmare before Christmas. It is spooktacular! When we went to Disneyland, it was October and the Haunted Mansion was all decked out for Jack Skellington. The kids and I loved it. Josh, not so much. He wanted the original.

2. Pick out and finally purchase costumes. So far, we have Optimus Prime and Boba Fett. Not sure what the kids are going to be.

3. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. This was the first year we went to this and I think it will become a yearly event. This particular show is over, but I think Lehi City puts one on, so there may be other showings, catch one if you can!

4. Pick out pumpkins and plan how to carve them.

5. Drive by our favorite Halloween House. Here is the address, 629 North 690 West American Fork. Enter that into Google Maps, you can even see the street view which shows a lot of the decorations. This house is great, it has two hearses, a graveyard, and almost every blow up halloween item available. You can get out of your car and walk around the yard. Spooky!

On our list of things to do are: take pictures of kids in costumes BEFORE Halloween night, carve pumpkins and roast seeds, make and eat pumpkin faces (check recipe blog soon for this family favorite!), host McCarrel Family Halloween Party, go to Witch's Night Out (also girl's night out) at Gardner Village, and watch some scary movies*!

*This family recommends Hocus Pocus, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, The Haunted Mansion, Ghostbusters, The Adventures of Icabod & Mr. Toad and Corpse Bride for scary movies!

The Whole Fam Damily

Since I am the only child who still lives near Zion (blessed be my name), we tend to arrange things around my rockstar brother and my other brother from another mother. I picked a day (perhaps the coldest day this year) that they would both be in town and arranged for family pictures. The rain didn't fall until we were almost done.

Cute kids, I know. Can't help it, it's just the way we make them.

Big thanks to Torie of Torie Jane Photography for putting up with the cold and my baby who didn't want to look at her. She is running a special, just mention my name and she will take your cute family pictures for $75.00, this includes proofs, cd with pictures and digital editing. You can also have them taken indoor or outdoor, no extra charge. For an extra 25 bucks, she'll make you a super cute Christmas card.

The best way to spend your next 2 minutes and 22 seconds.....

or longer, depending on how many times you watch it!
TWILIGHT TRAILER IN HD

Favorite Five: Fall Treats

First I just wanted to thank everyone for all the kind words about my grandma. It was so nice and very much appreciated.
Next I'd like to introduce you to Favorite Five Friday, she's a cousin to Top Five Friday. She's currently calls the beautiful Cache Valley home and I think she might be a republican, but don't give her too bad of a time about that. She's a pretty nice gal, considering who she's married to.

It was a little hard to qualify things as "Top Five", so I thought Favorite Five would bring a wider topic of things. Today's Favorite Five is Fall Treats. It will serve two purposes. I will tell you about my favorite fall treats (duh) and then to get the recipes, you'll have to visit the recipe blog I started. Then you'll have to sign up to contribute to said blog because I know you need something else to do and your hiding all your good recipes from me and that's not nice.

1. Easy Pumpkin Cake

2. Banana Bread

3. Pumpkin Muffins

4. Peach Pie

5. Pretzel Hugs

Please share your favorite's in the comments!

Maxine Cook Harris

My sweet Grandma passed away Wednesday morning. There are no words to say how sad we all are. She was the greatest Grandma you could ask for. So many memories have come flooding back to me this week, I wanted to share a few of them.

My Grandma was an excellent seamstress. She also did embroidery and quilted. When we were younger, my cousins and I all received handmade Pound Puppies, Cabbage Patch Dolls and quilts. As we grew up, they turned into dish towels and baby blankets. I finally got to use the pink baby blanket (with a cute poem attached explaining it was not for use now, but to go in my cedar chest for later) with Molly. My Grandma was a mean Phase 10 and Domino's player. She could recite any nursery rhyme or sing any song from her childhood without missing a beat. She and my Grandpa put up with 9 grandchildren on a week's camping trip every summer, and I think they even liked it. She made the best raspberry jam, dilly beans and my personal favorite, pine nut stuffing.

My favorite memory of all is that she worked in the lunch room at my elementary school. I thought it was pretty neat to be able to see my Grandma every day at lunch. All the other lunch room ladies knew my name and would say Hi to me as I went through the line. She would bring extra peanut butter bars to our house. Once I was old enough to start working in the lunch room, it was great, I didn't get stuck doing the crappy jobs, like the dishes. If you attended Sego Lily Elementary and worked in the lunch room, you probably met my Grandma. Josh remembers her, because once while he was working he got in trouble for building a dam out of food where the students dropped off their trays. She should have warned me about that boy way back then!

You can view her obituary here.