Church

Tonight, our ward’s young men and young women had an etiquette dinner, sponsored by the Priests Quorum (16-18 year olds).  They did a GREAT job and put a LOT of effort into making the night very memorable.  It consisted of quizzes on how to have good etiquette and how to act in specific dining and other situations (like cell phone use, dating dos and don’ts, etc.).

We then had a great dinner of pasta, salad, and drink and the kids really enjoyed themselves.  It was by far the best etiquette dinner that the youth have ever had (they have one each year).  They have their work cut out for them next year.  🙂

For Activity Days at Church today, Kirstyn and her group of friends made gingerbread houses!  They had a LOT of fun and enjoyed decorating the houses with their personal styles.  Last year the houses fell apart early due to the frosting not “sticking” the walls together, so this year, they used hot glue guns!  🙂  It was pretty funny.  So, now, instead of being 100% edible, they are about 90% edible.  We need to make sure we don’t eat any wall or ceiling joints!  🙂

Today was a very busy day!  We started off the day with a church service project at Feed My Starving Children, which is a food preparation and shipping charity.  When you go there, you make packaged meals of rice, soy, dried vegetables, and chicken powder.   Each packet is enough to feed 1 child 1 meal a day to keep them from starving to death.   I went up there with the girls this time.  Angela usually goes, but she was under the weather, so I got to go.

It was a GREAT experience!  In just over 1 hour, we packed over 18,000 meals, enough to feed 57 children a meal a day for 1 year!  What a great feeling!  We are planning on doing this again as a ward activity again will be doing more than just 1 session.

After we finished up there, and after Angela taking everyone but Ben for pictures (his will come later and we’ll post the pictures when we get them back) we came home and got ready for a Halloween afternoon of trick-or-treating and a party with friends.  The kids got all dressed up and went out to see how much candy they could get!  🙂

As you can see, Kirstyn dressed up as a 50’s girl with poodle skirt and all, Zach was being the Karate Kid, and Ben was an elephant.  They had so much fun!  The Raketic family came over to go out with the kids.  Sarah stayed home, worked on homework, and gave out candy to the kids who came by our house.

They were out going house-to-house for about 1 1/2 hours or so.  They got a TON of candy!  We couldn’t believe it!  We have enough to last until next Halloween (well, not really, we love candy)!  🙂  After coming in from the cold, we all sat down and had wonderful homemade chicken noodle and vegetable soup that Angela made and it warmed us right up!  We spent the next little while in front of the TV, watching Arsenic and Old Lace with Cary Grant.  It was funny and we enjoyed it!  We hope everyone else had a happy Halloween as well!

Today was a busy day also.  We started off with Zach’s soccer game.  They lost, but the kids played great and they are getting better and better every week.  I love the fact that the most important thing is just to have fun and that the score really doesn’t matter.  We got some good pictures, but the day before at Brittany’s cross country meet, Benjamin got a really sticky, gooey finger right in the center of the lens of the camera, so all the pictures came out blurry.

After the game, we did some house cleaning and then got ready to go to our ward’s Trunk-or-Treat activity.  Unlike normal, the back of our van was decorated for Halloween!  Sarah spent all afternoon pulling something together so we wouldn’t be one of the “undecorated and boring” vehicles in the parking lot.  Everyone got dressed up in their costumes and we went to have dinner, a Halloween parade, and then the trick-or-treating out of the cars in the parking lot.  We all had a lot of fun.  Benjamin was an elephant, Zach dressed up in a karate outfit, Kirstyn was a girl from the 50’s with a poodle skirt and my letter jacket from high school, Brittany was a country farm girl, complete with denim, red and white plaid, piggy tails, and freckles, Sarah was a fairy princess wearing beautiful wings, and Angela was a medieval princess.  As for me, I was 1 of two things:  A warewolf on a non-full moon night, or I was dressed as a mean dad who never lets his kids do anything.  🙂  There were some other great costumes there as well.

Ghostbusters!

After walking around to all the cars and getting their candy, the kids had fun eating a bunch of it!  As you can tell from the picture below, Benjamin was probably 150 degrees in his elephant suit but he didn’t care!  He had his sucker to keep him happy!

It’s hard to believe that it’s September already and that the kids have been in school for 2 weeks now.  Zach seems to be doing well and we have had no hint that he’s just got up and wandered out of his classroom during the day.  🙂  Sarah continues to enjoy Seminary and is loving the fact that the new high school is not over-crowded, having only Freshman and Sophomore classes.  Brittany is now running Cross Country.  They have a very small team this year due to the boundary changes in the high schools and middle schools.  She is one of only 3 8th grade girls on the team!  🙂  Kirstyn is doing well also, and just loves her teacher!  We still struggle with not enough time to get everything done and the kids struggle with coming home and getting right into their homework.  😐

Tonight we had a young women and young men combined activity at the church and had a lot of fun.  It was originally a movie night, but a large inflatable screen was brought into the gym (probably 10×10 foot in size) and we played Disney Scene-It, boys against girls.  All of the kids were encouraged to dress up as their favorite Disney character, and we had a great showing!  I was one of the judges and it was difficult to pick the top 5 and then to pick the best-dressed character!  As you can see, we had some really wacky costumes, and had some very brave young men show up in full “High School Musical” attire.  🙂  In the end, the winner was Minnie Mouse, just because the cheer from the younger girls was so high-pitched and loud.  The boys couldn’t scream any better!

After the activity, I took Sarah, Brittany, and  Taylor (Sarah’s friend) out for frosties at Wendy’s.  Sorry you missed out on this, Carmen!  They were really good!  🙂