Ashley and Eden are in the school choir.  Nothing too big, they just have to be at school an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  At the performance they did last weekend, a reporter from Deseret News was there interviewing the chorister and taking pictures.

Check out this site! If you skip to 1:48 you’ll see Eden!!!  The lovely piano music you hear in the background of the video is me!

So far they’ve performed at the Festival of Trees and downtown at the Joseph Smith Memorial building.  They have been loving it!  Here are a few pictures of those two performances.

Mandy and me on the shuttle from the parking lot to the festival.

Riding Trax!

They have 2 performances left!

Ugh, where has the time gone?

I know I said the next thing I would post are the girls in their costumes.  But when you get sick the day before Halloween and spend 3 days in bed trying to recover, you don’t care too much about taking pictures.  I was planning on having them dress up again, just so I could snap a few shots, but oh well.  Most of you saw them anyway.

We’re all feeling much better.  Thankfully we all survived the swine flu, well, everyone except Paul… he never even got it!

Here are 2 pictures I did get.  This first one is of Eden in her mermaid costume.  She loved the wig.

This one is of Amanda wearing a skirt and flower that I made out of Halloween bandannas!  This wasn’t her costume, just a cute outfit.  She was Belle for Halloween!

And here are a few pictures I found on my camera that I’ll post just for fun!

These last 2 pictures are of a gully right across the street from our neighborhood.  The first picture was taken in the morning, so the shadows are a bit deep.  The second was taken the same day, just in the afternoon.  What I love about these pictures are all the layered colors!

Sorry for the overload of pictures.  I guess that happens you you try to play “catch up”.  Next up, hopefully I’ll post the main reason why I haven’t been blogging.

This post is mostly for a reference for me.  I have to take pictures of how I decorate, or next year, I’ll pull out all my stuff and won’t remember the cute things I did with it the previous year.

So here’s a few pictures of my Halloween decor.  You don’t have to look, and it’s definitely not all of it, just some of it.

I’ve seen these cute bats all over!  Even at Christie’s house!  I wanted to do them outside, but didn’t have any felt, so I used what I had on hand, black cardstock.  Paul likes that they’re coming out of our vent.  I’m going to be doing this in one more spot.  It’s super cute and super easy, just a bunch of tracing and cutting.

I made this “Boo” set this year.  I don’t know what I think about it.  I think next year I’ll tear off all the little decals and mod podge some cute Halloween paper all over it.

You might remember our cute “girl” skeleton from last year.

Here’s the other mantel.

And a close up of the “Halloween” letters, I made at Enrichment night last year.  So easy to make!

And of course I have to include the haunted house the girls made!

Well, that’s it for now.  Looking at these pictures makes me realize, I’m not that great at decorating for Halloween.  Oh well, I’ll work on that.

Up next… our kids in their costumes!

We didn’t name him, but we did adopt him today!

His name is Entai!  He’s a Shiba Inu, that’s a Japanese breed of dog.  He’s 11 years old and just as sweet as can be!  He weighs between 20 and 25 pounds.

We’re happy to have a new addition to our house! 

I walked into Petco to get some mice food and the Humane Society was there with lots of dogs and cats.  I saw him and just fell in love!  He has such a sweet temper and doesn’t even mind the kids or the cats!  Even our cats seem to be putting up with him okay.

Oh, and he loves watching the mice.  I guess the breed was bred for hunting small animals, so I guess the mice would keep his attention.

Right now he’s been ours for 4 hours!  I took him for his first walk and was just loving it!  (don’t know how I’ll feel when it’s really cold outside, I might be cursing the walks then)

About 2 years ago, I was sick of my hair.  It was taking an hour to do it all nice for church or dates and I was bored with it.  So, I decided to chop it off and donate it to Locks-of-Love!  It wasn’t that shocking to me.  I had chopped my hair off before, only this time, I had a good reason for doing so.  When I told Ashley that I had donated it and what the hair would be used for, she decided she wanted to do the same thing.  She was only about 4 or 5 inches away from meeting the required length, so she didn’t have to wait too long.

So, on Saturday, I had a hair appointment scheduled and asked Ashley if she was ready to cut her hair and donate it.  She said she was ready, but wanted me to tell Paul (her dad) that she was just coming with me to keep me company.  She wanted to surprise everyone.

So, here are the pictures of it!  She was so happy with her short hair!  I can’t get over the fact how cute she is with short hair.  I probably told her 50 times at the salon how cute and adorable she looks.

The last two pictures of her long, beautiful hair before donating it.

Those are my hands cutting off the ponytail.

Here she is right after.

Now for the styling!

…and blow drying!  (That’s my step-sister, Kara, who did our hair.  Thanks so much Kara!)

All done!  Is it wrong to be proud?  I don’t care, I am so proud of her!

Normally, I don’t care if people comment, but if you wouldn’t mind, please leave a comment for Ashley.  She’s super excited about everyone knowing!

THANKS!

That’s Utah’s Fall and Spring for ya!

Yesterday it got up to 87 degrees.  YESTERDAY!

Today…. well, need I say more.

Yes that’s snow on the mountain behind our house.  The snow was only about 2 miles from our house and we got several flakes too, but nothing that stuck.

I love Fall!

Well, that’s exactly what it is.  FUN!

I bought some chalkboard paint 3 months ago and finally got the nerve to try it.  It’s so fun!  I don’t know why a postpone some projects for so long.  I always think it’ll be hard or that I won’t do it correctly, so I put it off, until… I finally get up the nerve to try it.  And then I find out that it’s so easy!

I bought a cheapo sliver tray at D.I. for 50 cents and just painted right over it!

I got this frame for free from someone and painted the chalkboard paint right onto the glass!  I finished this one late one night and decided it was too much black.  I looked through all my paints but didn’t really like them with the black, so I did what any creative person would do.  I raided my fingernail polish.  So don’t look too closely at the pink.  At least it worked!

Walmart had these cute square plates.  4 for a $1!  So I turned them into little chalkboards for my kids!

I’m still not finished.  I’m trying to decide exactly where I would like to have chalkboards, so I don’t go over board and do all the walls with it.  So fun!  If you haven’t tried this stuff yet, you should!

In an open field in front of Sandy City Hall, they put up American flags.  One for each person who died because of the attacks on 9-11.

I’ve seen this craft all over bloggerland now and had to try it, but I needed a good reason for trying it… don’t ask me why, I guess to justify doing a craft I feel like I have to have a reason for doing it.

Anyhoo, about a month ago, I got released from my 4 year calling as the primary pianist and got a new calling.  I was so bummed when they released, me.  Next year I’ll have one kid in senior primary and 2 kids in junior primary, so I knew there weren’t too many callings I could have that would allow me to watch them all.  That and I love being in primary!

So what calling did I get and what was my justification for making these cute things!?!  I’m the second counselor in primary now!  One of the few callings I could have gotten that still allows me to see my kids and figure out how much they do or don’t know!

My reason for making these cute notebooks… we needed to give the old presidency a “thank you” gift.  So I got 4 cards and had all the kids sign all 4 cards (not an easy thing to do in one Sunday) and made 5 of these adorable notebooks!  Why 5?  Cause I wanted one too!

I got the idea off of this site here.

Don’t ask me what I was thinking when I took these pictures.  I left out so many steps.  Also, there are much cuter notebooks out there, I don’t have a talent for decorating with scrapbook stuff.  I’m still working on that.  So these notebooks are very simply adorned.

Take an exacto knife and ruler and figure out how much of the corners you want to take off.  It really only takes a few minutes to do both corners all the way.  This part was the fastest!

Then, take your paper and mod podge it onto one side.  After it dries, take the exacto knife and trim it.  Then do the other side!

I used ribbon for the handles and hot glued them onto the inside.  Take a rectangular piece of coordinating paper and make the closer by gluing it to the back side.  Then take some velcro and put it on the flap and front side so it can stay closed.

Like I said, there are cuter ones out there, but oh well, these are the ones I made.

Since I already had the glue and ribbons on hand, this cost me a total of $.70 a notebook!  70 cents!!!!

Ashley is now begging me for one.

I know, this happened in August, but I still have to blog about it!  Since all our camping trips with family fell through, we decided to go it on our own, just our own little family.

To keep things easy on the girls we only camped for one night, but we headed up early Wednesday morning and didn’t get back till Thursday evening.  So it was long enough.  By the end of our hike Thursday afternoon, the girls were more than ready to be done.

As usual, here’s a ton of pictures, please don’t feel like you have to look at all of them!

And here they are in the order they were taken.

Notice how Amanda’s face is fairly clean (picture below).

Silver Lake!  That place is so gorgeous!  Paul and I talked a lot about what we’d do if we had a house up by that area.

Damsel Fly!

Amanda and Ashley were both exhausted after the hike!

Slightly dirtier face!

The river next to our campsite!

Okay, the face is slightly dirty, but those hands…

Here ya go, a really dirty face!  And so proud of it!

We hike up towards Doughnut Falls, but didn’t quite make it.  It was hot and the kids just couldn’t handle anymore.  Maybe next year we’ll make it all the way up!

Sorry for the long post.

YAY FOR CAMPING!