Happy Halloween!!

Jaime's second grade class had fun playing pumpkin bowling. I covered the water bottles with grocery bags with ghost faces. The little pumpkins made it through 21 kids and came home intact. The other game they played was a bean bag toss. I made orange bean bags and between the time I made them and the next day they were missing.
So I found our bean bags and slipcovered them with orange fabric and drew pumpkin faces on them



Since there is always so much junk I took cheese sticks and crackers. I needed something to put the crackers in so I used a cereal box and covered it with Halloween scrapbooking paper and made a black spider out of pipe cleaners. They also guessed how much candy was in the jar. The answers were funny anywhere from 50 to 1001, the real answer was 235.







Trunk or Treat at our church. Melissa and Amy with our Youth Pastor












We stopped at another church that had a parking lot full of jumping houses, slides and a carnival ride. They also had three big rooms of games inside. If we stop here next year I think we'll have a time limit. The girls didn't go door to door trick or treating and they really missed that part of Halloween. Than we headed on to Chick-fil-A to get free kids meals and our last stop was Chipotle's for a free burrito I wish we had took pictures of everybody in line with their foil masterpieces.

We were hoping to make it to the last home game to see Kaitlyn cheer but our time ran out.

Jaime was a bat we added ears and wings to a black sweatshirt and made fangs with pipe cleaners and white foam.

Melissa was going to be a red witch and than changed it to someone in High School Musical.

Amy was a puppy dog in the morning and a crazy princess in the evening.

Kaitlyn dressed up earlier in the week for a Trick and Treat night at the high school and she was Dorothy. I used a pattern and took a short-cut as in everything I do I'll see if she has any pictures and post later.

Happy Birthday Jim!

Amy and Jim at the parade.

20 years ago today!!

We were married in the county courthouse. Twenty-five years ago we started dating and I had a three year old. I don't have any pictures to post, I need to scan them. Hopefully in five years we can renew our vows or at least that's my goal. I use to think I'd want something in church but now I think I'd like to have an outside ceremony. I saw some sterling silver rings at the Renaissance Festival and the guy is local so I'd like to get bands for Jim and me. Jim lost his in our fire and mine is pretty tight. Happy Anniversary Baby!

Amy and I ran errands today and on the way back from Whole Foods the wind was blowing the leaves, geese were flying south and just a gray looking day but so fall. I loved it.

We met Jim at Panera's for lunch. I love their broccoli cheddar soup.


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Every leaf speaks bliss to me.
Fluttering from the autumn tree.

-Emily Brote

Turner Days and Homecoming Dress

Jim took Melissa and Jaime to the homecoming game while I stayed home with Amy and worked on the homecoming dress. Here are a few pictures of Kaitlyn cheering. Go Bears!!!

One of the things I love about our community is Turner Days. We live in a county that has three school districts and ours is pretty small with five elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. Turner days is always the weekend of homecoming, we have the parade with everybody lined up and down the street. It's just a warm fuzzy for me. After the parade everybody heads to the ball fields behind the middle school where booths are set up, they have a stage for singing and a few blow-up slides and rides. This year they also had mud volleyball that was pretty fun to watch. All the second grades sang together this year. Jaime couldn't make up her mind if she wanted to sing or not and finally decided she would. Melissa and Kaitlyn walked in the parade.












Here's a before and after of the homecoming dress of Kaitlyn's. We had some friends give us four dresses and she picked this one and I (for the first time) altered it. I could see a couple of mistakes I made. I asked 4-5 people for advice and took some of their suggestions and made a few changes. It was nice to be able to say I did it.

Kaitlyn's going to State

This is the second year Kaitlyn has been on the golf team. She is one of two girls from her school to be going to state, she is very excited to have made it!

Fall Swap

I received a wonderful swap package in the mail this week, from Julie .

She sent me a cute wooden fall basket full of wonderful goodies. A journal, hot cocoa Mix, a pack of Mary Englebreit cards, a stack of cute quilt squares to make an I-Spy quilt and lots of fall leaves.





I knew I wanted to make a table runner with some fall quilt squares I had, so I started cutting and sewing and came up with this runner. I didn't do the hand binding I went for fast and sewed and turned it inside out and than quilted on the top. I made a little pumpkin and threw in a couple fall candles and included one of our favorite cookie recipes.

Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
2 cups flour (I use wheat)
1 cup quick oats
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter/margerine, softened
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 15 oz can pumpkin
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup raisins opt
1 cup nuts (any kind) opt

Preheat oven to 350. Combine flour, oats, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Cream butter, gradually add sugars, beating untill light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla, mix well. Alternate additions of dry ingredients and pumpkin, mixing well after each addition. Stir in chocolate chips, raisins, nuts. For each cookie, drop onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 15 min..

I oOvermeasure all the dry stuff except for sugar. I left out the nuts and raisins and added extra chocolate.

Wonderful cookies.