And life goes on...

...too fast to get blogged about.

My sister Amanda came through town a couple of weeks ago en route to Vegas for a weekend with her husband's family. She got to meet Owen for the first time. We only had a short while before they had to get going so we served everyone breakfast then took some pictures and then Amanda, David, Iris, and company were on their way. Someone thought, "Here are a bunch of small children. Let's put them in the tree!"


Cousins. So sweet.



Later that afternoon Mark and I took the boys to the State Fair. Mark's family goes each year for the Figure Eight Races. If you don't know what this is, think a figure eight track on dirt with old cars and crazy drivers. Figure eight track means a thrilling cross-section of the raceway with near-misses and flying tires and even flipping or burning vehicles. The boys even went on a few rides.


Watching the races:



This picture didn't turn out very well, but the long sign that reads GIANT PIG says: "ALIVE" with quotes around it. We were wondering what "alive" meant. Not really alive, just what some might consider "alive." Maybe the GIANT PIG was in a coma.



Owen had two layers of hats to muffle the sound of the races. It worked apparently because he slept through most of it.

On Halloween I made a dinner I was pretty proud of--a pizza mummy.


This was a big hit and might become a tradition. I made a caterpillar-looking one without cheese for me and used refrigerated rosemary facoccia bread dough from Fresh and Easy. I used Fresh and Easy pizza dough for the limbed mummy so it made the operation easy peasy. For Halloween we all dressed up as Pokemon characters. One problem: not enough people know about Pokemon to know who were. We tried to stay close to Pikachu (Adam) to help people out. We failed in getting any pictures of the whole family in costume. Though we figure we may do a music video later so stay tuned for that. This is the best we got. We managed to squeeze in some pumpkin carving after all. Hurried and fast because it's time to go trick-or-treating.



Last week Mark got home early and was already home when I pulled into the garage from running errands with the kids. It was a windy day and Dallin asked if we could fly our kites. I told him yes though I figured we'd have to cancel dinner in order to make it happen because I had somewhere to be later that night. We've never done that before--cancelling dinner--but Nie Nie did it, so I figured I could do it too. We came into the house and Mark just happened to be in the backyard, untangling kite strings. I fed the baby, gathered some snacks and we drove (yes drove) across the street to the park. It was a perfect day for kite-flying because our three and five-year-olds managed to keep our dollar store kites in the air for long stretches at a time. We stayed outside until it got too dark to see and took five minutes buckling into the car to drive one minute across the street to our house. It's a busy street you see and jaywalking with three little ones is a little tricky.

During dinner last night Dallin asked, "Can we have a party tonight?" And I said "sure," then looked at the clock and added, "we can have a party after dinner for five minutes." I had picked up a storm trooper costume on clearance at Target, thinking way too far ahead for a Star Wars-themed Halloween next year. We already had our other Star Wars costumes from Halloween three years ago. Costume party it was! And five minutes turned into forty-five so the kids got to stay up late.



We are getting rebellious around here. Breaking all the household rules. But now that I think about it I realize that next year I will have a kindergartner and we will have more of a schedule to stick to and going to bed late on a school night won't be much of an option. So we'll try to enjoy our kids while they are here at home.