tête - à - tête

We are late. Again. I think ahead to tell the twins to go to the bathroom before we run out the door. Austin is in and out in the matter of seconds. Alaina takes her time. We get Austin's shoes on. We clean up. I grab the keys and my purse. Austin and I lock up the house and still no Laina. What is taking that girl? Austin has now started reading a book and I start the Laina chant. "Laina let's go. Laina, move it. Come on Laina. Can you hear me girl?! LAINA!" Finally I run out of things to do, so I headed over to the bathroom. Exasperated I stare at the girl kicked back on the pot. "Laina! You done yet?" "No." "Well, have you gone pee?" "Yep." "Do you have to go poo?" "Nope." Now I'm beyond riled up. "Okay then. What are you waiting for?!" At that moment Alaina looks me in the eyes and with a fair amount of attitude, puts up her hand to stop me talking and sounding more like a bugged teenager than anything else she says, "Mom! I'm talkin' to Jesus."My mouth drops open but I can't think of anything to say so I turn and walk back to Austin. As I leave I hear Lainy mumbling under he breath. Probably telling Jesus how rude & impatient her Mama is.

Here is my sweet Ethan with a Happy Meatball meal. Strangely enough the monsters were only really happy to eat the eye-balls. The cheerful asparagus was a harder sell.

Today at church Valerie stopped me and told me how polite the kiddies are. "Aha...we have you fooled." But she insists, "No, all during Primary we are interrupted by constant little hands waving around and little voices shouting out, "Excuse me!" Yeah. Polite. Another example of this would be our conversation in the car on the way to church today. I had run through the house look for Alaina's purse that she had lost before running out to the car empty handed.
Laina, "Where is my purse?"
Mom, "I couldn't find it anywhere. I guess you don't get it today,"
Laina, "Ah mama!"
Ethan, "Did you look in the play room?"
Mom, "Yes I looked everywhere."
Ethan, "Excuse me Mama but you are lying. It is in the the play room."
There is my oxymoron personified. My polite/rude child. Oh, and let's not forget correct. The purse really was in the play room.


And here are the results of our entire harvest this year. One little cherry tomato. Many other fruits and veggies were planted but the tomato was the sole survivor. I took a couple of pictures of it and couldn't decide which one to post...so you got both. Which is your favorite? The one with Ethan would have been cooler if his hand didn't look like it was disconnected from his body. Just a floating hand. But this one might trick you into believing that I grew a giant tomato instead of a tiny cherry one. The dilemma. Sigh.

Happy Halloween!

This year was really fun because the kids really got into the whole costume thing and Halloween landed on a Friday. What a perfect combination! On Friday morning I got all three kids dressed up for school. It was only when we walked down to the bus-stop that we found out that Ethan's school doesn't 'do' Halloween. Apparently no costumes are allowed at all. So there I was trying to strip off Ethan's costume as the bus was approaching while Ethan was trying to keep his emotions under control. It wasn't a pretty sight. What made me even more upset was that I realized in just a few days his school is having all the kids dress up for their favorite book character...so it isn't the fact that kids dress up for Halloween, apparently it is just Halloween itself that they oppose. All they had to do was have their dress-up day a few days earlier and then all the kids could at least enjoy the holiday. It just doesn't make very much sense to me.
Although Ethan couldn't keep his costume on, the twins could. They loved having their little parade and playing in their costumes. Later that night a few of our neighbor friends and Sara & her crew came over to go trick-or-treating in a big group. The kids are still talking about how much fun they had.

A few days ago we all carved pumpkins. Let me rephrase that: a few days ago we all prepared our pumpkins for carving. Then Robert had each kid pick out a pattern and he then carved the pumpkins. You can see how intricate each of his pumpkins are. Mine is the plain-jane pumpkin...but I refused to let him carve mine as well.

Every holiday I go over-board. I can't help it. Halloween has proven to be no different than Thanksgiving or Christmas. So this Halloween we had a pretty fun spread of treats. I made chocolate ghosts on lollipop sticks, witch-fingers with sliced almond fingernails, sherbet punch, mummy pig-in-the-blankets, rice krispies treats, fruit salad, sliced apples and carmel and pumpkin soup. Luckily everything turned out great except for the pumpkin soup. That was a good attempt but ended up having a bland base mixed with the overpowering taste of roasted veggies. We worked on it all day trying to save it but it was a lost cause. We had our neighbors, Pratiba & Dana with their families and Sara & Aaron and the kiddies come over before trick-or-treating started. It was a fun way to start off the evening. At least we got a little bit of fruit down them before the sugar high really kicked in.