Our first snow fall came way to early this year!!! Notice the GREEN leaves still on my tree??!! It's already melted now, but it lasted just long enough to build our first Snowman!
Good thing I bought all their snow clothes extra big last year....everything still fit!!
PUMPKINS!!! Jared gets the fun job of carving....the kids scrape out all the junk and separate the seeds......and I get to cook it all!!!
"Daddy, I dare you to eat the pumpkin!!!" 
Our finished Pumpkin!
Fall is my absolute favorite time of year!!! So, to celebrate it's arrival we always have a little harvest party with our kids. Each year we make a fall-themed treat, and express what we are most grateful for in the season. This year the kids wanted a pumpkin-spice cake with cream cheese frosting. I frosted it and added the vine, but they decorated the face all by themselves!!
Seth still wants to save the endangered Tigers when he grows up! They have been his favorite animal since he was about 2 years old, and he is so passionate about the ways we can help to keep them from becoming extinct! He saved up his own money to buy this Tiger mask and stuffed animal, all of which the proceeds go to help save the Tigers! They have 3 new baby Tigers this year, and they were all out, running around...so Seth was in Heaven!
Riding the new carousal!
Dylan's favorite....the gorillas and monkeys! He was kinda bummed that they were inside sleeping instead of outside playing in the trees.
1st day of School 2009! I can't believe how big they are getting...not sure I am ready to let go and let them grow up yet!
I wanted to make their first day back to school really special...so I got up at 3:30 AM (I know...seriously...what was I thinking?) and made homemade donuts from scratch!!! By the time the kids woke up, the house smelled so yummy, and the table was waiting with warm icing and bottles of sprinkles to decorate them with! It was an incredibly F-U-N morning! Think I'll make it a tradition every year!
Happy b-day #9 to my son Seth!!!! We gave him the choice to plan his own birthday party this year!! He could have planned to go anywhere, or do just about anything, (within reasonable limits) but s-e-r-i-o-u-s-l-y, he picked to stay home and have a relaxing day. I let him plan all the meals, and he decided what happened and when! He loved having control over a day of his own!!! His rules were simply this: Everybody has to stay in their jammies all day, and that we should have a never ending supply of my BBQ wings (his favorite)! We watched 4 movies that he picked out the day before, and we all took a nice long nap somewhere in between, on the air mattress that we set up for the kids to lay on while we watched all of our movies. He kept saying..."this is the best day ever!!!" I am so glad that children are so easy to please and that life is so simple to them. A great lesson- taken to heart!!
I made Dylan take off his shirt while eating the wings, since he seems to have my horrible genes of spilling everything, and he thought it was the coolest thing ever.....to be half naked, laying on the couch all day, eating chicken! My sister Wendy came down to celebrate Seth's b-day the week after, and that's when we had him open up most of his presents and had his b-day cake, but we lost our camera that night after the party and we haven't been able to find it since! As sad as I am about losing our brand new camera that we had just bought, I am more sad that you only turn 9 years old once, and that we don't have all the pictures and memories to save from it!
Boys will be boys!
BBQ and swimming party!
Check out all those guns...Lily and I are definitely protected!
Yes, that is a real snake! We took the scouts on an overnight camp-out and went for a 3 mile hike the next morning up Spring City Canyon. On the way down we found this dead snake, and Seth dared me to pick it up....can't ever resist a dare!
We played lots of football and outside games together!
Dylan lost his 1st tooth!!! And I have a funny story to go with it...We have always encouraged our children to dream B-I-G, and have B-I-G imaginations. So, Seth knows that the tooth fairy isn't real anymore, but Dylan wasn't quite sure yet. As soon as he lost his tooth, he exclaimed his excitement over the tooth fairy coming that night! His friend happened to be playing over, and very bluntly informed him, "Your mom is really the tooth fairy, you know!" I was bracing myself on how to still make this an exciting time for him, as Dylan approached me and asked, "mom, are you really just the tooth fairy?" Since I couldn't lie to him, I answered him with, "Yes, mom is just the tooth fairy." His reaction stunned me!!! Instead of Dylan thinking that there was no real tooth fairy, and that I'm just his boring old mom, making up silly tales, he took his friend's words LITERAL and now thinks that not only am I the REAL tooth fairy, but must be to all the children in the world!!!! He was beaming for days and told me that all he wants when he grows up, is to know my secrets of being the real tooth fairy and how I do it all!!! Gotta love the imagination of a 6 year old!!!
We played a lot at our favorite park~
We took a really fun trip up to Salt Lake City. We started the day off by going to the old graveyard in the morning. It was really cool to show the kids where John Taylor and few other great men were buried.
We went to the Beehive house and the kids got to see what life was like in the 1800's. We did a lot of other fun stuff, and had a great day out with the kids!
