Getting ready for the Holidays

So, once again it has been FOREVER since I blogged. I am so happy that we had stake conference today and I was able to have the afternoon to rest and now I am ready to blog :). Since we have afternoon church and I have recently been put in YW I was thrown off my normal routine of Sunday night blogging. We will be going to 9:00 church in Jan. so I am hoping that will help. I have missed it. I just spent the last 2 hours looking at all of our families' blogs. It has been a couple of months for me and it was great. I was going to comment on them all, but I got so excited to blog again that I am going to forgo that for now. Just know that all of your blogs were wonderful and I had a blast reading everything you all have been up to.

As most of you know, we moved this month. We were blessed with the opportunity to rent a home from a couple we know who were going on a mission. They were so good to give us this opportunity. At first they thought they might want to do a rent to own, but then they changed their minds because they thought they might want to come back. We decided to go ahead with the deal hoping in the end they will want to sell it to us. If not, we are going to have a very fun two years. We have been in the house for almost a month and we LOVE it! I will take pictures in a couple of days (since every room will be clean because Grandma and Grandpa are coming for Thanksgiving :).

This has been a very busy couple of months for us. David got called to the Elders quorum and I am now the 2nd counselor in YW. John and Tim (and their wonderful families) came to visit, the YW were in charge of a bi-ward Halloween party, we moved, and David and I went to our good friend Kim's wedding all in a matter of a month. It was a crazy, hectic, wonderful month!

Weird, I just went to add pictures and apparently I took no pictures of when Tim and Katy and John and Tiffany were here. I also apparently took none when we were in Boston either. I am so sorry to all you wonderful people. We loved being with you all so much and had such a blast. I know Dave took some pics, so if I can find them and figure out how to put them on here I will :-). I will however post the few Halloween and misc. pictures I did take. Sorry - kind of boring compared to all that other stuff.

Halloween was a blast this year, although it was very cold. We went trick or treating with a few friends which is always fun. The kids all figured out their own costumes. Joelle made hers. She was "Ribbon Girl" (a superhero of her own creation). She got a bunch of different ribbons and pinned them all over her clothes. She also got a cape and pinned ribbons on it for Samson and he was "Ribbon Dog". It was pretty funny. Ben has had this Superman costume for 3 years but this is the first year it actually fit. He was so excited. Our friend's little boy also came as superman. When he showed up at the door both boys looked at each other almost like "how dare you!", and then Ben said "you look awesome!" They were both happy after that and Ed never left Ben alone for the rest of the night. So cute! Emma was cold and decided she didn't want to dress up, but Joelle told her she couldn't trick or treat without a costume so they made some cat ears and put on some face paint and called it good. I think it worked out well.

David found Jacob's costume after Haloween last year. I think we payed around 3 bucks for it. AWESOME! I love good deals. He had been asking to go as Boba Fett for a few years so he was so excited (although you wouldn't guess that from this picture :).
Katie changed her costume at least 5 times that day and ended up in this dress up that I have had since Joelle was 5 years old. It has held up well and it was cute to see it on her since I think we will be getting rid of it this year. She loves to trick or treat and is always the last one asking to keep going. Emma and Joelle had done this kind of eye makeup for a bunch of the different Halloween parties we went to and Katie loves it. So even though she was a pretty princess she wanted the "dark eyes".

It ended up being really cold after we were out for a while. So even though I told Ben to take a jacket (which he didn't) he ended up with David's. Dave said he wasn't freezing but I could tell he was cold. He is such a good dad.

The kids loved having a graveyard last year so we stuck with the same thing this year. The pumpkin in back is Ben's. He designed and cut it out himself. He was pretty proud of it.

The girls did this whole pumpkin by themselves. They were proud of this one too. They named it Mrs. Norris (Filch's cat from Harry Potter - of course).

2 weeks after we moved in to our new house Emma's best friend Mikeala came to play. All the kids were outside when she said "hey, we should rake up all your leaves into a big pile and jump into them." -I love this girl :). So they all got out rakes and made a fantastic pile. They played for hours out there. (This is about a quarter of the leaves our tree has lost, and it still has a ton of leaves on it - crazy!)

They would all take turns running to the pile while everyone else would throw leaves up as soon as they jumped.

I don't think anyone loved it as much as Jake. He would have kept going all night.

They really had a blast. I love this girl. She is a great friend to all of my kids.

We were super early with our Christmas decorations this year. We just didn't want to move the Christmas tubs twice. So we emptied them, put up all our stuff and then stored the empty tubs. The kids were so happy. We even went out and bought some new fun decorations for this house. Since we are on the corner of a pretty major street, we really wanted to make it look good. I will try and get a picture of the outside to put up with the other ones, since I apparently forgot to do that when I was taking these pics. I seem to be forgetting a lot lately :).
David really got into decorating this year. I loved it! It was easy too, since there were already hooks everywhere we needed them. It is a very fun house to decorate. This is my David. I love his smile here, it is very "David".
This was an hour later because we ran out of lights and had to run to Costco to get some more :). Believe it or not it is 5:30pm at this point. I hate that dang time change thing (although I get that people like to have light in the morning when they get up for work or school - one of the best perks of homeschooling is not having to deal with that :). We did end up meeting a lot of neighbors this way. So many of them stopped to talk to us about how early we were getting started. They all said they loved it - I hope that is true :).