HAPPY HALLOWEEN! FUN TIMES!

I just love to see the creativity and fun the kids have with Halloween! We didn't get one trick or treater, which leaves me with a bunch of Reeces  peanut buttercups to eat myself!!

LaVerl grew lots of pumpkins again so the kids all got lots of pumpkins to decorate with!

I'll start with the youngest, Tami's family!

They went 'Patriotic' this Halloween!

Blake was UNCLE SAM! He said, "I want YOU to have

a Happy Halloween!"

 Colter was an ASTRONAUT!

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Adlee was LADY LIBERTY! 

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

 Ryne was ABRAHAM LINCOLN!

His line all night was, "Four score and seven years ago".

 And Tami was was ROSIE the RIVITER.

Remember the lady that was on all the advertisements for getting women to go to work to support the war?

Tami said, "This Halloween went down in history!"

Next is Reed's family!

Eliana was a 'LITTLE OLD GRANDMA!" 

The cutest one you ever did see!

Royal was the "little old Grandpa."

 And Reed was 'THE LITTLE GRANDSON!"

 So cute and so clever!

  Kari's family was amazing too!

Rivers was Link (from Zelda), Elijah was a clown, Leo was Doby (from Harry Porter) and Gabe was a very sick baby (he really was) in Halloween jammies. 

 Lisa's family was also adorable!

Lilly was a FLAMINGO!  Notice she is standing on one leg! 

While Lisa was painting Lilly's face, she gave Lucy and Landon suckers to keep them happy. She had sucker drips all over her house!

Lucy was the cutest PINATA ever!

 And Landon was an OWL! He was not happy being an owl and wouldn't keep his cute costume on very long!

Bret's family always has lots of fun carving pumpkins and making homemade treats to take around to the neighbors.

 

The final look-  all lit up!!

Bret- super Dad, helped his kids make all these Halloween treats to take around to the neighbors! Strawberry ghosts, pretzel witches fingers, rice crispy monsters, and peanut butter cookie spiders!

What went on 'behind the scenes' was a whole half gallon of oil that got spilled on the floor and the big mess in the kitchen!

But making memories with the kids make it all worth it!

Their Halloween costumes were also awesome. Becki and her mom are amazing! They are both super talented and creative.

London, Dempsey and Ivory was SUPER NOVAS! (stars) She also did all their hair!

 Kingston was MAGICIAN!

 Bret also loves to dress up for Halloween! He was a MAD SCIENTIST. He had lots of fun at their ward Trunk or Treat!

They had a scary booth that had things like peeled tomatoes for hearts, spaghetti noodles for guts, cooked cauliflower for brains,  olives for eyeballs, dried apricots for ears and he even bought 50 crickets in a jar to scare the kids. They had to go along and stick their hands in and feel what was in there. He saved the crickets for only the bravest at the very end!

Last to show off their Halloween costume skills is

Mark's family! Only the youngest dressed up!

Bolden was BLACK PANTHER.

Wembley was a cute BUTTERFLY!

 And Daxxon was SPIDERMAN!

And that was another successful Halloween! 

Fun times, fun memories! 

Life- the Good and the Bad!

Life isn't always all Good, but without the Bad, we wouldn't appreciate the Good, right?

LaVerl noticed a very wet, muddy place coming into our driveway.

Ugg!  A water leak!

We had to get our friend, Jack McCall with his backhoe to come dig it out so LaVerl could find out where the water was coming from.

 

 Then LaVerl started digging! For some reason the water wouldn't turn all the way off, so water kept coming out of the water pipe, so it was a muddy mess!

The mud was thick and like quicksand! His big rubber boots kept getting sucked in and he'd have to pull them out!

I think the little boy in him liked playing in the mud!

 He had to cut out big roots from the huge Elm tree that probably caused the break in the first place! It was pretty tricky trying to fix it with water still flowing out of the pipe.

The good this week was LaVerl worked on getting the Trex on our upper balcony off our bedroom! We are short 4 boards, so he didn't quite finish! The BAD was when we drove over to Show Low to pick them up at Home Depot, they had ordered brown instead of gray!!

LaVerl also made time to take my little cub scouts fishing. This was the first time some of them had caught a fish! Good times!

 
Also, some of our kids, Tami, Kari and Mark, entered a Triathlon in St. George, UT and won 1st place! Way to go! 

Before the month was over, we got some pretty strong winds! 
We woke up to this!! We had some dead trees on the south side of our house and one of them blew down and broke our fence.

Also along our driveway, the small bushes we planted 30+ years ago, have turned into huge bushes, or else have died, so I got a 'wild hair' and started pruning, trimming and cleaning. Now we can see our playground area.

 

Enjoying the HARVEST!

Fall means apples and pumpkins around our house and kids coming home to enjoy the harvest.  All 3 of my girls got to come home for a few days and it was really fun. Kari's boys loved helping Gpa fill up the garage with wood.

Rivers really wanted to ride a horse, so we asked Tony, a guy renting some pasture from us if he'd let the kids ride his horses. He was so super nice to take the time to saddle one of his horses and let the boys ride and feed them apples. 

This was Fantasia!

This one was Zip, he won some major races when he was younger!

Elijah and Rivers loved it!

Did you know Eagar has a Zoo? Its been here awhile, but I hadn't ever gone. We all went and it was GREAT! They take you on a 2 hour tour and its definitely hands on and fun.  The kangaroo in the bottom right corner of this picture has a baby joey in her pouch!
They are the size of a lima bean when they are born, then live in their mama's pouch until they are 8-9 months old. This one popped its head out while we were watching, it was really cool! 
(It's a tail that's showing!)

They have a very friendly camel named 'Christmas' that came close enough that Elijah got to put his arms around its neck. 

The sloths were pretty cool too.

Climbing trees and eating apples! Great fun!

 We've never had so many apples fall on the ground before. It was a weird year!

From this----

 

 It was lots of work having to cut out all the bad parts, but we did it. Colter said this was the BEST applesauce he'd ever eaten!

Adlee loved it too.

 

Lilly was a great little helper! Landon too.

---to This!!
We made 62 quarts of beautiful apples.
 

Then on to Picking out their favorite pumpkins!


 

Monday we roasted hot dogs and made S'mores. It was a perfect evening, not too many more of those left before the cold comes.
Adlee's hair!! We were all cracking up!

I just wanted to add this Fall picture of J'net and I when they came to Eagar.