Picture catch up

My mom has been begging me to post a picture of Cash dressed as a Mormon pioneer. It was the multicultural day at school and you were supposed to come dressed representing your heritage. At first I thought, oh great, everyone is going have all this great stuff from their Latin countries and Cash is going to be the kid in blue jeans representing the "Average White American Kid."  Then I thought I'd make it a little more interesting and go with our Mormon pioneer heritage. He was pretty stinking cute.

Boys trying to get some shade at the pool:

The twins with their preschool friends:

Just playing:

  

Loved that these three happened to be snuggled up reading a book and all wearing red:

I love watching these two sleep. I often go in to find one of them sleeping with their foot across the other one's face.  Can't you just imagine them in the womb like this?

  

I mentioned we've been to Disneyworld a few times now since we got annual passes. It's been fun...and exhausting. I'm not really sure Ryan and I can keep it up cause man it wears you out. Hauling all those kids and all that stuff on and off of trams all day, standing in line, etc. Plus we usually drive home after and so get back to Miami at like 1am and are totally wiped out. Even with that said, I still am wanting to go again since it's been a few weeks!

Watching the parade (we've even dragged Grammy along):

And we've managed to see it decorated for different seasons now:

  

  

Although this poor kid is just like, why am I here and where is my bed? And why on earth am I still up at this hour?  He doesn't love it, although he had some pretty good squeals watching Mickey in the parade.

 

  

Shoot, that safari ride in the Animal Kingdom is pretty good. Took us a week on safari in Africa to see the Big Five, and you can get it in 20 minutes at Disneyworld.

 

  

And this would be the biggest reason Ryan and I may not last through many more of these trips:

Yeah, we were so sore the next day from carrying babies and kids all day long!  Next time I'll insist we get one of those big Disney strollers for the older kids. We thought they could hack it but man were they whiney. But then we looked down and realized that they had to take three steps for every one of Ryan's - that really is a lot of walking. 

Ryan and I got to go in one morning and stay for breakfast at Cash's school during spirit week.  It was "mix and match tacky" day.  He couldn't get the idea of trying to not match (I swear it would have happened naturally had I not tried to tell him about it), but we at least got him to try to look goofy and it was pretty funny. (Um, not to mention all the parents didn't recognize me out of my pajamas.)

And we got to go one night for his exhibit night at school.

  

And man, we thought the tub was getting snug before with three men in a tub....

Halloween is so last month

But whatever. We've been to Disneyworld and had strep throat since then so late will have to do.

Ryan and the baby and I were a trio:

Did you guess?  A lion, a witch, and a wardrobe. (The green face was a last-minute idea I thought the kids would like or we might have gone theWizard of Oz route.)  When I came out dressed to go Ryan looked me over and asked jokingly, "What happened to a sexy witch?" (since that's the take on every costume in Miami).  "Yeah," I said, "Cause this is definitely not it."  And while I did make for a really ugly witch, Ryan was sure the cutest little wardrobe out there.  (I sort of gave him an ultimatum that he dress up this year or else....)  I did get multiple compliments on my wig, however. (Which sadly, was just my own hair and took all of about 2 minutes to get that way.)

If you can differentiate from the messy table we have - Pirate/Captain Jack Sparrow (Ashton); Bumblebee Transformer (Phoenix); and Spiderman (Cash):

Frankly the baby didn't seem all too smitten with Halloween for the most part.

I think we managed to capture probably the one smile on camera.

Ashton at the bean bag toss at the ward party: 

We stopped in at Ryan's work:

 

And I even managed to throw in another Halloween party.

Cute pin-the-nose-on-the-pumpkin that Betsey brought:

 

Raising their hands for who wants to eat ghost poop  :)

And alright, while this looks like we're doing a seance or something, I actually included a new little activity this time on my homemade light table that was pretty fun.  We used witches wands (glow sticks) to make magic bubbling witches potions (vinegar + food coloring + baking soda).  They actually really liked it.

I even had a pretty good collection of Halloween lanterns I'd made by the end of the month:

And I made a plethora of spiders to hand out for the whole two trick-or-treaters that came to our door.

But let's be honest here. The reality of the season was I was a little Halloweened out by the time the 31st rolled around, the weather on Halloween was yucky, trick-or-treating here was lame (the boys went for like an hour and only found 4 houses giving out candy), the baby hated his lion grass:

Captain Jack hated his hair -

 

it took bribery and possibly a few threats to get him to wear it,  it was so much effort getting everyone ready I remembered why I've never dressed up myself before, it rained during the ward trunk-or-treat and the kids had to fight a madhouse of teenagers to get some candy inside the over-crowded building, I had to walk around our building planting candy on people so our kids could flippin trick-or-treat on Halloween, and we didn't get any cute Halloween-setting pictures in costumes (the baby's costume is still sitting out waiting to be put back on for a cute photo shoot. Should probably just scratch that idea at this point).  

Oh well, I still have good memories.  And now can move on to some real holidays.  Like my birthday.

I am the best

Yesterday Ryan said to me, "Turning on closed captioning was the best thing you've ever done for our kids."

Shoot.  I'm such a good mom.

Seriously, give it a try if you want to feel better about yourself for letting your kids watch tv.  Ryan really thinks that's why our kids can read so well. (Um, ok, there were a few survival years in there where our kids may have watched a lot of tv.) I guess I could take that statement the wrong way considering all the other monumental things I've done for our children, but I'm just choosing to pat myself on the back for being the best mom in the world right now.  :)  You never knew it was so easy to be so phenomenal, did you?