LEARNING TO DANCE IN THE RAIN: October 2012

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

OCTOBER 31, 2012: HALLOWEEN

HALLOWEEN 2012

WE BROKE THE FAMILY RECORD!!!

What a fun Halloween! One part that was great for me, the mom, was that the kids put together their costumes and Rachel was the fashion consultant. Then Rebecca and Rachel gathered everyone's costumes and kept them together in boxes and laid them out for the kids before they came home today!!! What a deal for me!!!

I got to enjoy doing make up and seeing their great smiles!!!

David -- Bozo the Clown

Matthew -- Karate Kid

Bethany -- Loonette from the Big Comfy Couch

Daniel -- a ninja

Mason -- "Woody"

Isn't he the cutest thing ever???

Benjamin -- a Frenchman

He trick-or-treated in French, too!

Rachel -- a cat

What is impressive is that Rachel created this costume completely by herself!!! She is so creative! She bought fake fur and used a glue gun!

I tried to get Rachel to do something that looked like a cat
and the picture above is what I got! :)

Rebecca -- a witch

Rebecca really wanted to paint her face green! I tried to talk her into a cute and happy witch ---- but she really wanted to paint her face so we went with it. She was fun!

Still a cute witch!!

Joseph -- a student

Louie had to dress up, too!

The Whole Gang!

I had to put both of these pictures because I love Mason's silly faces!
He jumped in with no coaching!!

Just a bit of Richardson Family Trivia:
The Clown costumes I made back in 1990ish and I made 2 adult costumes for Dad and I then I made one for Alison. I had more fabric so I made a baby one for Melissa when she was born and then later made a bib for Hyrum when he was a baby! Ahhhh! Memories!

OUR FIRST STOP WAS "MALL-O-WEEN"

THE CANDY COUNT!

We decided this would be our last year of our crazy, yet fun, tradition!!

For over 15 years, we have worked to beat the previous years record of candy brought home in the trick-or-treat bags. The record from 2007 of 2,576 pieces of candy stood for a LONG time!

This year we broke the record with 2,596 pieces of candy!!!

There was some "hoopin' and hollarin'" around these parts!

Next year we will start some new traditions and work to see how much we can give rather than take. Homemade smoky rootbeer and "Stone Soup" sound like some good ideas!

The boys show the buckets of candy and then it gets all poured out in the middle of the family room floor for the "sorting!"

Benjamin's dream!!! "Mine! All Mine!!"

The honest truth is that we were just short a couple hundred pieces of candy from the main haul so we had to be a bit creative!!! Enoch Fleming, who lives with us, added his candy count in since he was with us trick-or-treating! Then Joseph and Enoch both added their candy they got in a bag today from Seminary! THEN we were just less than 100 pieces of candy short from the record so I texted a couple of friends, but they were out. Then we found out that Sister Fleming, Enoch's mom, had some candy!!! The kids went crazy! I told them they had to earn it trick-or-treating so they all went outside and Sister Fleming started throwing it to them through the peek holes in our door! We let her contribute 1 bag of candy -- 133 mini-Reeses cups to our count and that put us over the record! Yahoo!!!

It was a great Halloween!

What fun life is and what joy our kids bring to our lives!!!

I thank the Lord for our wonderful family and fun memories that we will always have!!

Monday, October 29, 2012

OCTOBER 29, 2012: PUMPKINS AND CARAMEL APPLES

PUMPKINS AND CARAMEL APPLES

OCTOBER 29, 2012

We finally had a night when we were ALL home so for our Family Home Evening Activity we carved pumpkins and made caramel apples! What fun!

The first activity of the afternoon was led by Rachel! She helped the kids make a ponybead pumpkin key chain! She even worked for a long time with Mason and helped him string on his beads and make one!!

After our yummy curry dinner --- we carved our pumpkins! The kids worked well in teams and did it pretty much by themselves after dad trained them all!