Haven't heard enough about New Moon?... well, let me help

Three hours of sleep feels so good when it's as a result of having a late night with great girlfriends! Amanda wins the award for the best party thrower and putting together the most awesome vampire and werewolf decor - woohoo! She even made us individualized treat bags to take to the movie. :) Kiana wins the award for getting us the coolest matching t's - her hubby is a graphic designer and designed us some pretty sweet apparel. It's nice to have friends with connections. hehe. Let's start the countdown to Eclipse! *just updated below with some new pics from Tessa - thanks!*






Katie blowing out the candles on her New Moon cake - Happy Birthday!! You know this party was JUST FOR YOU!

"Find Mr. Turkey"

To Play: One person (we'll call this person "the farmer") hides, while the rest of the group hides a turkey. The farmer then tries to find his lost turkey by following the sounds of the gobbles. The louder the gobble, the closer he is.
The video below shows our attempt at playing :)

He stands!

Look at my new helper! I can't believe he's already pulling himself up to stand all over the house - in his crib, at the coffee table, chairs, and now at the dishwasher. I'm anticipating an early walker with this guy... he seems to be doing every physical milestone much earlier than with my girls. He was rolling over at about 3 months, sitting up at 5 1/2, army crawling at 6 months, and now pulling himself to standing at 7 1/2 months... so walking at 9 months seems like a logical next step, right? We'll see I guess - he's definitely keeping me on my toes... and I love every minute of it! He's so great.

So, since it's nearing Thanksgiving, I thought it would be fun to make these with the kids. But when I got to the grocery store to pick out the candies I'd need to put them together, I changed my mind - 'cause I'm a scrooge lately and decided I didn't want to pay for the mini peanut butter cups, candy corn, and white chocolate chips necessary to put them together per the instructions. So, I opted to just buy candy corns and let the kids decorate their "thanksgiving" cupcakes with those. See? On mine I put the candy corns sticking up like turkey tail feathers... so we used our imagination... and by placing the cupcakes next to my ceramic turkey and indian corn, they become very 'Thanksgivingy' indeed. :)

Dancing Skeletons

It feels strange that it's already November! I'm not really mentally ready for the holiday season, but to start in preparing myself, I'll first tie up loose ends by posting about our Halloween night. We were quite the sight all dressed up in our skeletons get-ups. The 10 of us went around with the kids for trick-or treating to 15 or so houses... at one of the homes the nice people who answered the door wanted to take our picture. :) We ended the evening by putting the kids to bed and watching The Watcher in the Woods... it gave me the heebie jeebies!













We played around with a black light and had fun dancing with our skeleton bodies... we're pretty goofy... and most definitely hopped up on a bit of sugar ;) OH- and people asked where we got the costumes... well, we actually made them - Ben's mom, sister, and I all spent Conference weekend cutting out and ironing on bones over black clothes. The kids shirts however, were bought at Children's Place... that's why they glow yellow - because their shirts already had glow-in-the dark stuff on them.

No-kid Halloween Fun!

I definitely view Halloween as a kids holiday, and as a mom it's SO fun for me to watch them enjoy trick or treating, help them do jack-o-lanterns, and just create fun holiday memories. BUT, it's also a great time for an awesome 'no kids allowed' Halloween party! :) It was thrown by a fun couple in our ward (and veteran Halloween party throwers!) and was a great opportunity to try to better familiarize ourselves with all the amusing people in our new area. Thanks to Mike and Melody for a really crazy fun evening!

One of the many games we played - picking up the cereal box with your teeth and ripping off a piece until there was nothing left... the result was some pretty funny pictures!

FeAR FaCtOr! - This crazy guy ate two LIVE crickets... his prize was 40 bucks. A generous reward, but I definitely would not eat live crickets for $40! Would you?

Catherine and I going at our swinging donuts :)

Donut Eating! from Susan Dangerfield on Vimeo.

Trunk or Treat

There's always lots of Halloween related posts at the end of October - the holidays definitely bring about lots of parties and plenty of fun! So, onto some more fun - we had our ward trunk or treat last night and the kids loaded up on candy. Beforehand though, we ate dinner and played games in the church. Emma and Becca's favorite was the cakewalk. They very much enjoyed their cupcake winnings! They also had a pumpkin carving contest and Ben's pumpkin won for 'funniest pumpkin'. Our prize was a huge Costco pumpkin pie! And it was a lot of fun getting all dressed up in our skeleton costumes for the evening - you could definitely tell we belonged together!

Let the fun begin!

The annual Halloween festivities finally got going this week and I've already had my fill of sweets... too bad we haven't even been trick-or-treating yet! First off, for FHE on Monday we decorated and ate sugar cookies (as you can see, the frosting was a bit runny and added to the yummy mess ;)





Last night Ben organized some fun family time - we carved pumpkins and roasted the seeds (and while doing so Ben recalled THIS little clip). We also made caramel apples and got very sticky! Mmmmm. Oh, and with the kids pumpkins - they drew on the pumpkin what they wanted the face to look like and then Ben carved where they had drawn.























This morning (while Emma was at preschool) Becca, Jake, and I went to "the other ward"'s playgroup Halloween party. (For the record - I am attending my own ward's playgroup/park days as well, but since each ward's playgroups are on different days each week, I try to go to both, because I'd miss my old friends too much if I didn't). For Halloween this year, we all are skeletons! I was wearing my costume as well, but I like to avoid pics of myself. ;) Don't worry though - you'll be getting plenty of pictures of us all in our skeleton costumes soon enough...





I was realizing that I have quite a lot of photos of the kids decorating cookies at this same table at the Midwestern clubhouse... at many different holidays. :)



Finding ghosts during the 'ghost hunt'



Now we're gearing up for three more Halloween parties. I'm happy to have started regularly running again.. it just might help me break even with all these sweets being eaten.