Filling in the blanks

Today was the first day that we USED our cushy new insurance. It was my first eye check-up in almost 4 years! My eyes are dimmer than they were 4 years ago. Sigh. But, a new prescription = cute new glasses! I can’t show them to you yet because I don’t have them yet. And I can’t exactly show you Jeff’s new eyewear because he got contacts. So, let me fill in those blanks with a few stock photos from the last few weeks. And you thought  you’d already seen every single picture I’ve ever taken…





Her hair is growing…


…and so is his!



I made this hat for Rose and clipped on one of her cute bows.


or not.

 

And I thought I could get a picture of both kids sitting and smiling serenely at the temple.

 

Rose is so good at using her sippy cup now.

Yes, he taught a whole day of high school with that stache.


Jay calls the open dishwasher the moon, and he loves driving his cars on it.

One day, Jay got himself a diaper and a diaper for Rose, and then laid down next to her, all ready for a change.


Most mornings these days, I shirk my motherly duty of pushing that heavy stroller while running. I cheat and park it at the park while I run laps around the playground. Jay gets to play, I get to run, and Rose gets…fresh air.



I love running down that fence through the leaves. Sadly, the city vacuumed up all the leaves this week, so it’s less crunchy now.

Can you tell that Jay likes to watch online videos of track races?

When we get home, Jay usually likes to go on a run of his own. A few weeks ago, I drew a chalk line around the driveway to be his track. It keeps him from running off down the road. Mostly.

Don’t worry, Rose gets exercise in her own way. I’m not sure what to call what she does these days. It’s not quite scooting. It’s not crawling. It’s not very fast or efficient. But it is moving. She just wriggles and reaches, and the next thing I know she has grabbed her goal.



That’s all…for now…

Mrs. White in the kitchen with the…

…hand mixer!

Happy 25th birthday to this Mrs. White [and her kitchen]: a heavy-duty SWEET hand mixer to replace the old $3 one that died on the eve of battle, causing major whipping woes.

Let me back up. Friday, November 4th was my birthday. It was a great birthday full of phone calls, treats, leaves, fresh air, and family fun. Jeff still had to leave for work at 5:30am, so I took control of my birthday—I realized that it was up to ME to make it super-duper. It was fun thinking of each thing I did all day as a birthday gift. Here are a few things that I did on Shaina-day:

Steph gave me the gift of a run without the 100lb stroller. She came over at 7am and watched Jay and Rose while I shiverrrred me timbers on a frosty morning trot. It was invigorating to be free of that beast of a stroller, and to run without worrying about chilling my children too much.

After a hot shower and a hot bowl of oatmeal [ok, and one—no, make that 2—homemade cinnamon rolls], I swept and mopped the kitchen floor while listening to Disney music (my favorite cleaning tunes). The music and the resulting clean floor were a good birthday gift. While I was cleaning, a sister from our ward stopped by with a birthday candy bar. She brightened my morning. Also, Hershey’s cookies and cream bars are GOOD.

I talked por telefono with my old roomie/best friend, Laurs (we have the same birthday, except she’s a year older).

Jay, Rose, and I loaded up the stroller and went to the library. Then we walked over to our favorite park in Grandview (Eastside Park). It has lots of big, old maple trees with gorgeous leaves everywhere. We had a little picnic and then frolicked in the fall. This made my day. I love playing in the leaves. I love playing with my kids. I adore playing with my kids in the leaves! And you know what else I love… PICTURES of my sweet kids:

After lunch, we each had a mango dum-dum pop.

Even Rose tried a little lick or two…

She liked her carrot much better. Good girl.

I brought some bubbles, but we only blew about 3 before Jay dumped the bottle out. Oh well, on to the next toy: I brought my slingshot! But we couldn’t find any rocks anywhere, and the playground mulch didn’t fly very far.

Leaves!!! I used a small forked stick to scoop-rake up a modest pile of crinkly crackly crunchy leaves for us to play in. Then I took a million pictures. Each one counts as another birthday gift.

I’m so glad I was born in the fall. It’s my favorite season! Jay and I started running through the leaves after we got tired of taking pictures. Then we got out our frisbee and threw that and raced each other through the leaves to try and get the frisbee first. THEN we got out the little foam football and did a little of that. Thankfully Jay is too young to know that his mother is actually not good at football at all. We giggled and galloped around the leafy park while Rose looked on. I felt so light and carefree! It was a great birthday celebration.

When Jeff got home from work, he made sure I got some reading time in. That is such a good gift for me. And he gave me 2 pounds of Reese’s. Then today, I discovered 8 pounds of peanut butter tied together with a bow from my sweet friend Ashleigh. I am in PB heaven!

Various dear family members called and/or visited to say happy birthday. I love them.

Later that night, it was present time and candle time! I had made my birthday chocolate cheesecake the day before because everyone knows cheesecake is better after a good 24 hours in the fridge. Well. I made this cheesecake after my hand mixer died and before I opened my new one. That plus some grainy chocolate made it rather…gray and spotty. But it did taste good even after all that. Thankfully.

Cheesecake is such a tricky dessert to make. If it wasn’t so delicious, I wouldn’t bother with it. In college, my dear friend/birthday-twin Laurs would make me my birthday chocolate cheesecake, and I made her birthday carrot cake. It’s been 5 years since we were together on our birthday, and I still haven’t figured out how to make my cheesecake as well as she did.

And just like that, I need more than one box of candles.

The Great Pumpkin Post

Pumpkins are one of my favorite parts of October. I’ve been dying to do a to post about our pumpkins for a whole week, but I waited so I could just do the whole pumpkin-Halloween everything all together. Without further ado, THE GREAT PUMPKIN POST.

We went to good ole Bill’s for our pumpkins. Sorry Linus, but this wasn’t a very sincere pumpkin patch because it was a fake! It was just a field with pumpkins scattered around it—no vines in sight. But it still had the pumpkin patchy feeling.

Ever since I discovered all the sweet settings on my camera, I’ve been excited to use them in a pumpkin patch. So I plopped Rose down and took a picture on almost every setting. I had fun.

Jay is in that 2 year old phase where he will NOT sit still for more than 2 seconds at a time, so I couldn’t get any pumpkin patch pictures of him. Plus, he had just woken up from his nap and he just wanted Jeff to carry him. So Rose is the star here.

I’m enjoying Rose’s immobility while it lasts—once she starts moving around, I won’t be able to get any good pictures of her either.

There was this cool hay-ground (hay playground…it was actually straw, but hayground sounds cooler). However, like I said, Jay wasn’t really in the mood. Sadly. Because it looked fun!

You just can’t force a kid to play. We quickly got our pumpkins and left. Ah well.

Thanks to endless parent-teacher conferences and other evening obligations, we didn’t have time to carve our pumpkins all together until the Saturday before Halloween.

Jeff usually uses a pattern, but this year he just freehanded it—not bad, eh? He finished his in 20 minutes flat, and then started taking pictures of the rest of us.

Jay didn’t really like the slimy pumpkin guts, which surprised me because he sure isn’t scared to paint with peanut butter and jelly. Every day. I had to scoop out his pumpkin for him.

Eeew! I asked Jay if he wanted a scary pumpkin or a happy pumpkin, and he chose a happy pumpkin, with teeth. So that’s what I did for him.

My pumpkin wouldn’t stand upright, so I had to get creative.

Meanwhile, Rose enjoyed a sliver of pumpkin in the background:

 

All aglow! My cranky long-nosed pumpkin with a scabby spotty head, Jay’s classic toothy happy pumpkin, and Jeff’s sinister scarred pumpkin.

Rose’s little punkin’ turned out to have a super hard shell, so I killed it.

I think Jay’s is my favorite, and it barely took 5 minutes to carve.

Time for an intermission with refreshments: Witch fingers! I’m not in to cutesy baking—I love all the fun ideas out there, but I prefer putting my time into cooking real FOOD. When I saw these on one of my favorite food blogs, though, I couldn’t resist.

I mean, the possibilities were too tempting…

Ok, I’ll stop now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But really—how great and gross is that? Blood-crusted green fingers. Jay loved them—he called them fingermails. I wrapped the witch fingers up and handed them out at the ward trunk-or-treat.

Speaking of our ward trunk-or-treat, I forgot to bring my camera to it. Picture this: large, gorgeous home in the middle of vineyards and orchards. An 8+ car garage. A table laden with steaming pots of chili. Laughing, costumed families. Cute kids. Cars. Candy.

[insert recycled picture] Trunk or Treat finale: We wore our kilts again and Jay got a bucket of candy, in spite of his timid little “trick-or-treat.” While I was chatting with friends, Jay sat in the trunk with Rose and started chowing down on his candy. By the time I noticed what was going on in there, he had eaten at least 3 candies and had an awful purple Now-and-Later all OVER his face. I wish I had a picture of that one.

Now the DAY: Halloween! Jeff took Jay out trick-or-treating to a few houses. Of course, first on the list was the Whites. Reemah and Herpah sent Jay home with a sizeable ziploc baggie full of peanut butter-based candy for Jeff and I. Yay! They take good care of us.

Jeff thought I was taking a picture during this video. Whoopse!

And around our little 5-plex, we had a small stream of trick-or-treaters, but they didn’t even use up our one gallon bucket of dum-dums! So now we’re stuck with half a gallon of dum-dum pops, plus all of Jay’s candy. It’s so hit and miss with the flow of trick-or-treaters—last year we ran out of candy in about half an hour and we had a HUGE bowl of it. Hopefully one of these years we’ll actually live in the same place for 2 (or more) years in a row so we can predict the number of trick or treaters and plan accordingly.

While Jay and Jeff were out, Rose and I were in. Making pumpkin scones and eggs and hash browns for dinner. We always have something pumpkinny for dinner on Halloween. I didn’t feel like wriggling Rose into her kilt for the third time, so I put her in Jay’s old “Mommy’s Little Monster” shirt instead.

 

Just for fun, can you tell who’s who? (answer: left-Jay, right-Rose)

The bow helps a little, but this shirt is just too boyish for a little daughter to wear. Well, when all the trick-or-treating was said and done, we all sat on the couch and watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! (which is another one of our Halloween traditions around here) I love Snoopy the World War I flying ace. And while I wouldn’t throw rocks in the bags of kids with bad costumes, we should really have handed out some rocks to the kids who didn’t bother to dress up but still expected candy, or the kids who just stood there sullenly and held out their bags for candy without saying anything. Or maybe that parent who asked if she could have some candy too? (she wasn’t dressed up) Sigh.

After Jay and Rose went to bed, I whipped up a trick-or-treat blizzard for us parentals. Here’s what I threw in the mixing bowl: vanilla ice cream, a scoop of peanut butter, 1 Reeses’s, 1 mini Snickers, 1 mini Butterfinger, 1 mini 3 Musketeers, 1 mini box of Milk Duds, 1 mini Kit-Kat, and half a pouch of M&Ms (the other half sustained me while I was mixing up the Blizzard). I turned on the Kitchen Aid mixer full throttle for a minute or two, and voila!

A Halloween Trick-or-Treat Blizzard: the perfect way to end October.