Cake Batter

Heather here. Sometimes I have an experience that I think I should blog about this, but don't feeling intimidated by the need for a fancy picture, clever title and wording blah blah. Guess what? I don't care today. For posterity sake I just want to note that for the first time in 18 years I made a cake by myself this week and it was horribly lonesome. Where did all my kitchen helpers go? Granted, there were many days with two or three helpers by my side, when I would ask myself does making a cake really have to be THIS messy? The answer...yes it most definitely does and should. Anything fun really should cause an extravagant mess. So I prepared the batter in a snap, popped the cake in the oven...thinking the entire time this is painfully boring. No one fighting to crack the egg, lick the beater, threatening to loose a digit by sneaking a finger in the rotating KitchenAid. I go to the sink and there it is. The empty mixing bowl with all the unused chocolate cake batter just waiting to be licked. My mind flashed to tiny Clayton, Eli, Chloe, Liam and Kate. Each tackling the bowl in there own way. Some tidy, methodical...Kate and Eli managing to wear it everywhere-hair and all. I really could have sobbed there for a good hour. I don't even like chocolate cake which left me no choice but to wash the bowl. Again, boring.

Our babies growing up has been a heart wrenching event for D and I. I am going to get a grip someday...right?

Eli's Birthday Bash

Eli turns 14!!! Doing anything for Eli is fun because he's quite a grateful little guy. He's been begging on his hands and knees for a stupid cell phone for the past 8 months or so but I didn't see the need... until this year at Junior High. I'm not sure what happened but Eli is hard to track down half the time, I suppose because of being "Mr. Social" and all. It seemed like everytime I'd head down to West Kaysville to pick him up on a Friday night at the house he originally got dropped off to, he would have "house hopped" down the road or sometimes even across the city somewhere but, you guessed it,...nowhere to be found when I'd show up to pick him up. Yes, we've had several man to man talks about this situation grinding my gears and he'd reassure me with words of "I won't do that again without letting you know", etc, etc. Suddenly I saw the value of being able to track him down with one of those dumb devices. So...we caved. On his birthday morning I found the cheesiest ring tone I could find that I knew he'd love, snuck in his bedroom, put it by his ear and gave him a call around 6 a.m. He jumped up on his knees and kept saying "what the heck?", while searching around. We flipped the light on and sang Happy Birthday to him. Oh how I wish I had a picture of how happy he looked as he caressed his new love...the cell phone.

Eli is probably the biggest geek/coolest kid that I know all in one. He's constantly dressing up for no reason other than entertaining himself really. Hope you get your wish dude.

It doesn't look like Eli's having fun but rest assured, he is. Maybe he's playing "Mr. Cool" for the lady friends.

The mummy rice krispie treats

The food was awesome

Even the Butler was in attendance

Time to eat that cake

Eli's quite proud of this picture he's holding up of himself when he was in 1st grade dressed up as an artist for Halloween...how appropriate.

The party didn't end here by any means. We had to wait until a little past dark and then we headed out to the famous "Haunted Hollow" in Ogden. It was a lot of fun after finally entering the Hollow with about a 45 minute wait. My ears are still ringing from all of the girls screaming.

Liam plays soccer

This is kind of a funny thing. Liam was a little miffed that he missed his window of opportunity to sign up to play soccer and one day that he was complaining that he wanted to play soccer "so bad" after going to his cousin Sam's soccer practice. Well, as luck would have it there happened to be one player on the team that kept not showing up, so...the "no-show" got the boot and Liam joined the ranks on Sam's team-Liam couldn't be happier. Not too surprisingly, Liam is very good at soccer. I'll include some pix of the last game and a short video clip of his goal! He's scored at least one in each game so far-he's loving it.

Liam patiently waiting to be called in

Watch that ball

Both Liam and Sam go for the ball

Liam and Sam looking cool after the big game

Proud Dads of the players

Liam's big goal:

Halloween Town

I can't believe how much I LOVE Halloween. I'm not sure exactly what it is but everything about Halloween is awesome-the scary movies, decorating the house with creepy stuff and parties. Heather gets a little miffed that "Fall" decorating in the house gets jipped a little bit because we go from summer to Fall (only for a few weeks) then...Halloween. Our house transforms into Halloween Town about the last week of September (Heather is really pushing for me to not do a thing until October but it's so hard to wait). Each year some things change with the decor (mostly the outside stuff) just because it's so fun to switch it around a bit. I will give the quick run down of everything. First of all you have to set the mood with creepy lighting (I like green and black lights the best), add a Halloween sound effects that plays outdoors, then you definitely have to have a graveyard of some kind (this year we had a dead dude crawling out of the ground), a strobe light is a must and finally I am very proud to say that the 2 newest members of the Halloween gang are: the "Ghost Lady" and...the "Butler".

The Butler has a funny background story that I have to write about. Back when Kate was about a year old I stepped into Walmart and saw the "Butler". It was one of those moments of not even thinking about it, grabbing him and walking directly to the front register for purchase. When Heather saw me at the register checking out with him, she looked at him, then looked at me and we had a short conversation about how this was going to give Kate nightmares for the rest of her life. A few miutes later I was pushing my new purchase directly to the Returns section to give him back to Walmart. I thought I would give Kate a few years to get used to the Halloween house, then I'd re-purchase the Butler. Little did I know that he'd be so hard to find a few years later...sheesh! Walmart no longer carried the Butler and he was no where to be found online. I checked last year and found a few online...for $400!!!??? Yikes....well, I took a while coming to grips with the fact that I may never own the Butler. This year, about a month ago I was determined to seek him out once again. I checked again online, found a few listed from $400 to $500, then low and behold...there was one listed...for 80 bucks!!! I hurriedly entered all of the important information and pushed the "purchase" button...and waited about 10 days for his arrival. Yeah, it's a little crazy and Heather thinks I've lost my mind, but he's sooo cool....and Kate loves him. When I brought him home I didn't tell anyone that I had him and I set him up in the front room and called for Kate to come in. She ran in and screamed, then laughed, then gave him a big hug. You see, I've been talking about the Butler with my kids ever since I first bought him and they were just as excited as I was to get him back. I'm very proud of the "Ghost Lady" too. I was in Savers and saw that they were selling those styrofoam womens heads and I thought...perfect! I bought it for 2 bucks and grabbed about 6 white kitchen garbage bags and tore them up somewhat, then I attached those together and created a creepy dress. The best part is this, I had a dumb little ghost that would move left and right on a 25 foot cord that I wasn't sure what to do with...until now. I tore apart the cheesy ghost and mounted the motor in the Ghost Lady's head so that now she can fly around the graveyard. In fact, I liked how it turned out so much that I bought another head and am making another one for the front of the house. Here's the tour:

This is right inside the back door and it creeps out the preschool kids everyday they come.

Heather bid on and won the "bride and groom" skeletons that you see here at a Relief Society service auction because she knew I would love them-she was right. It's hard to see but the groom has a hand tied silk bow tie-too cool.

We have this kid size skeleton sitting on one of the old nursery chairs from the rock chapel that was given to us...the preschoolers like this one a lot too.

Meet...the "Butler"

He's too cool



This is in our front window. The main scary lady actually has a face on the other side of her head as well to face outdoors at night. See the pictures and video (coming soon) below to check out the night scene.



This is "Samara" from "The Ring" coming out of the ground in the graveyard which I moved to the side of our house this year.

Ok, here she is...the "Ghost Lady" that I'm so proud of. The cool thing is that she has a voice activated motor that makes her slowly "float" left and right at night.

Here she is closer up

The gate at the entrance of the graveyard

Almost forgot about this phantom-he's "flying" by our front door thanks to a hot dog roaster being placed in our flag holder.

This is our front window at night