A 2011 Thanksgiving

Myles Has Been Busy

The house we live in right now is super super old and has many many years of not being cared for properly. Therefore it has tons and tons of problems. Most of these problems don't bother me too much, I think it gives the house character but Myles on the other hand, well, he's the one who has to repair much of the existing character! One of his most recent finished projects was the fence and the gates. This is not how we had originally planned on putting the fence in but as we have limited resources we needed to make do with what we had and get our yard safe for our little monsters. The bonus of putting the fence up this way is that the boys are able to ride their bikes in the driveway without access to the road. The downfall is that mom is usually in a hurry when she needs to go somewhere and forgets to check behinde the car.

 Myles next project was replacing the door to the pump house. Several of the original doors to our house are in rough shape. They are old, fragile from the sun and mis use by previous house guests and their animals. The fact that two of my children are monsters does not help our poor doors. It seems to me that these little boys can find the weakness and defects in any thing and that seems to be the signal for them to go to town and rip it to pieces! As a result every banged up, holey, half toredown door in our house and out has pretty much been demolished! As a result, Myles needed to replace the door to the pump house before it got cold enough for the pump to freeze up. He did a pretty darn good job if you ask me! I am impressed anyways.☺

The next door that he made was for our garage to keep the cold cold wind out of our living area. This is the original door going from the house to the garage from both sides. As you can guess the first thing to come off was of course the wood paneling. From there the boys felt it their good luck to have a place to practice their kicks and punches and from there they just decided to tear the door down piece by piece. Myles and I eventually took the entire thing down being as it had become more of a hazard than an asset.

 Here is the replacement door that Myles made. I was going to originally going to paint it but then I decided that the kids would probably just kick it and chip it so I stained it instead. It is very impressive! Gives the room a rustic feel.

The finished product..............

My Halloween Projects

 I've been feeling much much better of late. As a result I've been up and doing more around the house. I've also had a huge desire to get crafty. Not having much money to go buy things for decorating and what not has made me soooooo super glad that I'm a bit of a pack rat. Therefore I've had the resources that I've needed in order to make a few really cute things for Halloween. Plus I've got a wonderful husband who is willing to do silly things for my like cut boards into odd size pieces!☺

This picture was my first project. I painted the frame, drew, traced and cut out my haunted house and rubber stamped the other scary Halloween things. I really would like to get a cricut or something like it but until then I'm happy doing things the old fashioned way.




My next project was actually a series of things that the kids and I put together. We had a lot of fun working on these.

Spiders glued to magnets for the front door and fridge.

Our mummy door was a hit with the kids. It did not look
too cool though by the time Halloween rolled around.

My creepy googlie eye frame. This was a lot of fun to make, not so much fun to remake! Allen enjoyed pulling the
eyes off. Lindy got frustrated after about the 3rd time of glueing them back on.

I painted on of my many many glass vases black then
added a beautful bouquet of spider covered flowers.
Clayton at first tried pulling them off because "Why would
mom want spiders on her flowers!"

Then we finished up by decorating the outside with spooky wavy vines, ghosts and spider webs.

For the vines I used a black plastic table cloth from the dollar store.

Our ghosts were simply garbage bags (which we salvaged for proper use
later) and milk jugs with ghost faces colored on them. They looked really cool from the road rather than up close!

These are 2 of my favorite projects. I had a lot of fun making my creepy cutouts. They are alot bigger than I expected them to be but they are super awesome on my door step.

 I'm very proud of my BOO letters. So proud that I actually left them up several weeks after Halloween and just barely took them down to put up my Thanksgiving deco.Clayton and Allen painted tp rolls so that we could turn them into monsters and I made my own monsters out of an assortment of jars. Not bad considering that I'm not really much of an artist!

Our Halloween

 This year for Halloween we didn't do as much as usual. I didn't take any treats into the schools and we only had 1 Halloween party other than Trick or Treating. It was a very laid back holiday for once and I very much enjoyed it! We were very busy the night of Halloween however because someone thought it would be a great idea to have a HS soccer playoff game before trick or treating! Chelsea didn't do anything for Halloween at all because she is in the Beauty and the Beast play. They insisted that the kids have rehearsals instead of yummy candy fun. Go figure! Anyways, as I was running late because Ky's game ran into overtime, we quickly wolfed some dinner down, got costumes on (Thankfully the older kids had had the forsight to get themselves and the little ones as ready as possible) and as I was heading out the driveway to get Chelsea to practice an hour late and the rest of us to Trick or Treating 30 minutes late, I stopped the car, made everyone get out and we posed for pictures amongst many complaints.

We didn't have a lot of mulah for costumes this year. Actually Britten was the only one with a new bought costume this year because he worked hard to earn it. We have enough costumes that we've used and made over the years that were ok in the costume department. Madison used a costume that I made for Natasha's 8th grade play. I learned how to make a shirt look like it has muscles underneath in order to make Clayton the Hulk. For Allen all I had to do was make the hood, making the mask to go with it was not that easy though. He didn't care that it was stupid though. As he was getting dressed he kept saying "I'm bat man and I look good." As long as he was happy thats all that matters! He did ask who his Robin was going to be! It was very cute.

Our Magical Genie

The amazingly strong Incredible Hulk

 Lindy dug through the costume box until she was able to piece together a pirate costume. She looked great even though people kept asking what she was. Really! just because she doesn't have all of the store bought accessories people, you can't use your imaginations! What is the world of constant video games and tv coming to?

The Beautiful piratess Bloody Lindy

The secret and powerful Ninja B

The Sweetest Bat Man the
world will ever see.



I saw the idea on pinterest to be a little beauty queen from the show that I never watch Toddlers and Tiaras. I thought it was cute, super easy and fun to make and did not cost a lot. Just what I needed.

The might hunter and the spoiled toddler in a tiara!

Minnie showed up for Trick or Treating with us, she got her first taste of how babies change lives. We spent a lot of the evening sitting on the curb feeding a baby. She took this picture of him earlier in the day. Such a baby angel. I don't know what I want to eat more, the candy or the baby! This by the way is Allen's favorite picture! Everytime he looks at my phone he insists on seeing the picture with Myles in the candy.

The one who cared about Halloween the very least!

Our First Grand Baby Bump

I have finally gotten around to editing MiMi's baby bump photos. Why I started with the horse photos I don't know but I guess I had so start somewhere!☺ I already know what many of you are saying and believe you me, I hear ya!!!!!!! In hindsight I could have done such a better job on these photos but I was so busy being a nervous mommy and grandma that I rushed and did not pay attention to details. After all, a part of my life was on top of that horse. Minnie really wanted some photos done of her on the horse though so I obliged. It's a good thing that my subject matter is so drop dead beautiful or else the pictures could really be a disaster!

 I normally really like this edit with the black but it is just not turning out that well. I'm still including it though.

I have discovered that closeups are usually the most loved of our loved ones, however it seemed odd to me to have a girl on a horse and only show the back of the horse which is why I have the full body equine shots. I really do love this one of Mi Mi up close regardless of the half a horse.

I just could not get over how cute my baby girl was with her perfectly round little baby bump. She was just sooooo adorable!

Our 2012 Graduate