Halloween 2019

Halloween is still a whole season of events!  Elliott had a huge preschool party and got to wear his costume to a bunch of library events. Molly got to wear a costume to both dance classes the week before Halloween. We had a church trunk or treat that had great neighborhood attendance. We went to the elementary school costume parade and Molly's class party.  Gerrit had a work potluck that Elliott and I were invited to but it was too much to try to do with the school parties.  By the time it's actually time to trick or treat it feels like it has been Halloween forever!


Elliott couldn't actually sit down in his Halloween costume.  Oops!  He was the only kid not wearing a  Halloween costume for the concert.

 He did such a great job with the music!  He knew all of the words and movements.  My only regret is that I took a ton of video, and somehow managed to miss the three funniest moments.

Moment #1:  After the first song, Elliott turned to me and said "Mommy, are you so proud of me?"

Moment #2:  One of his songs involves someone opening the door and finding a goblin and a ghost.  Elliott turned to me and yelled "Don't worry, Mommy!  They are just trick or treaters!

Moment #3: In the middle of one of the songs, Elliott turned to me yet again and said "Mommy, sometimes my teacher forgets all of the hand movements."  His teacher talked to me about this in the line for pizza later and said he wasn't wrong.

The preschool puts on an amazing carnival with tons of games and crafts and activities.  Elliott wanted more than anything for me to buy him the pizza lunch so I did.

 His very favorite was the inflatable slide.  He went on that so many times!

 Every class has a little Halloween display with a craft for each kid.  Elliott's owl is on the bottom left closest to the "Trick or Treat" sign. 

 Here's our Halloween costumes!  Molly decided to be a 50s girl and wear the poodle skirt I made her for the daddy-daughter dance in February.  I wasn't going to argue with that!

 I did make her some sorta-saddle shoes to go with it.  We found these cute baby blue suede oxfords on clearance and I painted the middle with gold fabric paint.  She wears them as normal school shoes now!

 Miles hated every single idea anyone gave him for Halloween this year.  He finally decided that a Rubik's cube was slightly less lame so that's what we went with.  I found this box at Michael's that was luckily the perfect size!  Gerrit spray painted it black and cut all the holes for me, and then I glued on colored cardstock to match Miles's actual Rubik's cube. 

Funny story about Miles's costume.  Someone ran up to him at school and yelled "Miles! You are not solved! Your life is not solved!"  Ah, the perils of wearing a puzzle costume.

 All Elliott wanted to be this year was a rocket.  Not an astronaut, a rocket.  We turned Miles's old robot costume into a rocket by adding cardboard fins and boosters, felt flames, and covering the old robot controls with a cut-paper American flag and NASA logo.  I do not recommend trying to make a cut-paper NASA logo, by the way.  That thing is complicated!

 I was waiting for the costume parade to start when I got a phone call from Miles's teacher.  Any phone call from the school during the day just about gives me a heart attack.  I was kind of relieved, and kind of annoyed, when it turned out that Miles just didn't want to do the costume parade and was going to come sit with me.  I think he hates the noise and the requests for high fives. 

We followed Molly at the end of the parade to lead some Halloween charades for her class.  I was worried about Elliott but he read Magic School Bus books the whole time!

Our Family According to Molly

Molly did some very cute projects about our family at school. 

 I like her teacher's comment, because yes, I think it is also great work and that her handwriting is great.  Miles wants me to add that it's better than his (accurate) and also probably better than Gerrit's (also accurate).  I love that she identified two of our family hobbies as ice cream and eating treats (third accurate in a row).

They only had to put their immediate family and maybe their grandparents.  Molly also wanted to put in all of her aunts and uncles, her cousins, and her great-grandma. She even has the hair colors and styles mostly correct!

Almost Christmas

Oh, snow.

I do not feel like it should snow in October. EVER.

I had seen snow in the forecast but I thought it would be that there were some snowflakes in the air and mostly rain.  Nope!

Elliott: "Mommy! Look! It's almost Christmas!"

It was not.  It was not even Halloween.  Alas, it was also not even the worst of the late October weather.  This was followed by a three day cold snap with lows in the 12 degree range. Gross, but at least Halloween warmed all the way to the mid-40s!

Last Year's Christmas Card

Yes, I know this is belated. Yes, I know that you would probably be expecting to see a 2019 Christmas card in late November.

I was super disappointed last year when I realized that I had given away all of my Christmas cards without ever taking a picture.  In previous years, I had designed our own Christmas cards so I always had the files on the computer.  I looked all over the house but realized I just was not going to have a record of those cards :(

My mom to the rescue!  She still had our last year's Christmas card on her fridge!  Here's the pictures, not because anyone else is going to be interested, but because I want to have these on record.

Bay Area Day Seven and Eight: Church and Driving Back

On our last day in San Jose, we went to my childhood church congregation (ward) with my parents.  We've visited my parents several times, but it always ended up being on a day with General Conference or Stake Conference so I haven't been to their ward in ages and ages!  It was nice to see several people I haven't really seen in a decade and to meet people that have moved in since I moved away 16 years ago :)

I went to church in a building that has a few quirks you don't see in the large majority of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints buildings.

 Like an outdoor courtyard!  Granted, our building here would have to do a ton of snow removal all winter if we had this, but it was fun as a teenager to have all of our classrooms out here.

 The Relief Society (women's organization) is in a room off of the cultural hall.  This is the only building I've ever seen that in.

 It also has the kitchen in the cultural hall, and I think all of the buildings SHOULD have that.  It makes so much sense!

It was their practice for their children's program.  Miles and Molly were great sports but poor Elliott couldn't do another practice two weeks after ours, so we roamed the building and built the Golden Gate Bridge out of hymnbooks.

The rest of our day was a quiet day watching our favorite BYUTV shows, playing games, and reading FoxTrot (at least, that was Miles).


We headed out very early Monday morning to go back home!  It was the last day of our fall break so we needed to get back.  I took the first leg of our drive through the Bay Area up to the Sierras, where we stopped for a picnic breakfast in our pajamas.

Not-so-fun fact about myself:  I basically want to be home from the minute I start going home on a road trip.  Anything at all that makes the trip take longer makes me want to cry.  We were going to stop for a long playground trip and picnic lunch, but I couldn't handle it.  We ate lunch outside a Maverik instead.  It was extra-hard this time because I knew everyone would need to wake up early the next morning for school and work so we needed to get home pretty fast.

Not-so-fun fact about Miles: He apparently shares this same trait with me.  He was so tired of the car and having to sit between his siblings that he completely broke down right around Tooele (which is only 2 hours away from home) and just could NOT handle any more car trip. I felt very bad for him but really couldn't do anything.

We stopped for dinner at R & R Barbecue by our house and it saved everything.  Miles went back to being in a good mood and it helped people adjust back to our everyday schedule because we were eating at a fairly normal dinner time.

We had a wonderful trip! It was good to get away for a while and spend some time with my parents.

Bay Area Day Six: Playtime in Los Gatos

We went on several outings that I associate really closely with my childhood this day.  Our first big stop was to Oak Meadow Park.  This is one of the best playgrounds in San Jose and it's really close to my parents' house!  It has the best playground and also a merry-go-round and train.

The big draw is this old plane that has been turned into playground equipment.  There's nothing else quite like it!

 They also have some play train equipment that Elliott was, no surprise, a huge fan of.

 There's a ton of fun slides, bridges, and climbing equipment and it was yet another perfect day!

 We had a yummy picnic lunch and then headed over to the carousel.

 It was a long line for the train but nothing feels that long when you can play the hand game in line!

 Elliott is on his fourth train in four days so he is in heaven.

 After the park, we headed to Icing on the Cake.  It's always crowded but the line moves fast!  We got these cupcakes along with some maple pound cake and banana cake.

One of everyone's favorite things in Los Gatos is Affordable Treasures.  It's a combination toy store/craft store/party supply store/Oriental Trading.  I was able to get some tiny plastic dinosaurs for a project I wanted to do with Elliott for 10 cents each, candy sticks to make caramel apples with, thread for a sewing project, and tons of ideas for the kids' Christmas presents!  Miles made me take a picture of this shelf so I wouldn't forget what he wanted.

 I did a ton of hand-sewing this day because I was doing some pattern testing.  I'm not sure if the pattern will be live by the time this post goes up so here's a sneak peek instead :)

 We'd had so much fun that the kids needed some quiet time.  Gerrit stayed home with the kids to watch The Love Bug while my mom and I ran some errands to get Elliott new socks and pick up some food for the drive home.  I don't get to spend much time with just my mom so it was nice to have that time with her!

Bay Area Day Five: A Train Through the Forest

My parents planned some fun activities for us this day!  Our first activity was to drive into the mountains to take a train through the redwoods.  Elliott was so excited.  The whole train ride home the day before, he'd been saying "Are we going to take the train tomorrow?  I just want to take the train again!"  Wish granted!

Roaring Camp has an old steam-operated locomotive that takes you on an open-air trip through the redwoods.  Again, it was a beautiful day and perfect for the trip!

 You can't really capture the magic of the redwoods from pictures.  There's something so amazing about trees you can't even see the top of.  I realized on this trip that this is what I always picture in my mind when I think of a forest and it's also the smell that's familiar to me.

 They stop the train halfway through for you to go out and walk in the trees.

 Walking on redwood logs is so much fun!

Miles has never met a tree he didn't want to climb.  The Chinese tourists on the train with us thought this was amazing that someone was trying to climb a redwood!

 We had a yummy hamburger lunch and then took some time at home to play games and toys with Grandma.  That night, we took an outing to Golfland with my parents!  Molly didn't start out having much fun because she wouldn't let us show her what to do, but once she finally realized that we wanted to help her and not tell her she was awful things got better.  A bunch of us got a hole in one!