Soup and Song

Today Gregory's class had it "Soup and Song" day. They invited guests to homemade vegetable soup and a couple of songs. Gregory's teachers tell me he and his buddy Brady spent the entire morning chopping vegetables for the soup! (with little plastic knives!)

There's Gregory's buddy Brady in the Gap shirt

Bowl of soup

While I was watching Gregory's show,
Bailey was enjoying a Thanksgiving
"Friendship Feast" at her school!

 Busy, busy, busy!

Luke's First Birthday Party!

Little Lukie celebrated his first birthday today! We had lunch at the Tower Grille and cake and ice cream and Uncle Ryan and Aunty Joey's! Lots of kiddies and lots of fun, but we missed Grandma who was home with the flu. :(

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Pixieland

Today (and tomorrow) the kids are on holiday from school for Veteran's Day. They woke up at the crack of dawn, so I had to come up with something to do for the day. The weather was nice so I decided to take them to Pixieland! (by myself!)

Now, I was thinking it was going to be an amusement park that we'd have to do a little walking, but it's pretty much the size of a small zoo ride area. The kids rode 4-5 rides, we hung out for a little over an hour and we were home before lunch! After lunch we decided to hit the park to use some pent up energy and we ran into a couple of classmates from Gregory's school!

Kids had a fun day - Mommy's pooped...Tomorrow we're going to visit Grandpa and Grandma!

Train ride

Coin operated boat that they just sat in to take a photo

Plane ride

Frogger

Car ride

The fastest Merry-go-round EVER!

Gregory's dizzy look!

Happy Halloween!

This morning the kids woke up and had a Halloween party in their room with all their little buddies. They made Halloween decorations, danced and were busy for a good hour and a half! When we went downstairs they brought their party and played while I made a Halloween breakfast of cinnamon toast pumpkins - I had intended to make spooky ghost pancakes, but I was just TOO POOPED. For lunch we made crescent roll mummies! That was pretty fun. We had an open house today so after lunch we cleaned up and decided to take the kids miniature golfing - a first - and I don't know if you've been miniature golfing lately, but it has changed. They used to have all sorts of fun buildings and little hidden holes - now it is mostly short putting greens and TWO fun holes out of the 18. The kids thought it was the neatest thing, but not like they used to be... When we got home we quickly started dinner - I was planning to make our traditional pumpkin meatloaf, but that takes 2 hours so I changed my mind and was going to just make a regular meatloaf so the kids could eat and be ready to go trick-or-treating by 6pm, but then Gregory asked me to make a "special Halloween dinner" so Clark said he'd help me make the pumpkin meatloaf. I ended up making both and we ended up eating the regular meatloaf that was ready in an hour while the pumpkin finished cooking. Bailey carved a cute face and we'll have to eat it for lunch one of these days. Good thing the kids (and Daddy) like meatloaf! Anyways, after dinner they got ready, put lights in the pumpkins and off they went! They brought home an awful lot of candy - most they were allergic to - but they know they the routine - bag up all the candy they can't eat so Daddy can take it to work! They were really excited this year because there were about 10 pieces they were still able to keep! Side note - I had some RUDE trick-or-treaters this year!! Kids who would grab candy out of my bowl with the parents standing right there!! UGH.

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Pumpkin Carving

Well, this morning we got a call saying someone wanted to see our house between 11a and 2p (could they have a larger window?) so we decided to take the kids to the Lindsay Museum and out to lunch. With all our house preparations these last few months we've hardly gone out to do much with the kiddies. Well, I forgot my camera, but they had a great time working on the animal search and getting a wildlife collector card for completing it. We also had a GREAT lunch at this new little Japanese restaurant in Walnut Creek called Miraku. (We'll be going back again soon.) While we were finishing up lunch we got another call from a realtor saying they were going to look at our house so we stopped in downtown Walnut Creek for a bit and made another stop at OSH to kill some time. When we got home the kids were a little wired so they played a bit and we decided we'd carve pumpkins after dinner.

Our kids LOVE to carve pumpkins. Bailey says it's her favorite part of Halloween. Not really the carving pumpkin part, but the playing in the pulp part! Now, we have an open house tomorrow so playing with pumpkin pulp was not the smartest idea, but what can you do? After we did a little cleaning up, I washed the seeds and roasted them up - Actually more like pan fried them up. I put a little olive oil and nucoa in a pan and cooked them until they were toasty brown, added a little garlic powder and a pinch of salt. Gregory musta ate two handfuls and kept telling me how yummy they were before we had to cut him off. If you're into parmesan cheese - that makes a great addition along with a little Italian seasoning too! OH I LOVE pumpkin seeds!

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