How is it that I haven't blogged in like a week?! Honestly, it's because work for me has been very busy lately including mid-day conference calls (which are extremely hard to do with the boys running around) and working as many hours as I can after the kids are in bed at night.

So...I have a lot to say (warning: potentially boring post!)

Last Monday I took the boys for their H1N1 vaccinations. I was so super proud of them. They knew exactly why we were there and we even talked about how the shot was going to hurt just a little. They stood in the long, but quickly moving, line and kept saying things like "is it our turn yet?! I promise I'm going to be brave!" Logan was very intent on going first...until we got into the room. Suddenly he decided Aiden could go first. Aiden actually had no problem with that, let me take off his shirt, watched the needle go in and didn't even flinch. As soon as Logan saw Aiden's reaction, he jumped up, took off his shirt and yelled, "me next!" Brady went last and did cry...until the nurse brought out a bucket of lollipops...then it was all fine and dandy.

Other Monday things: swim class and soccer. We recently switched our swim lessons to a new place. Logan and Aiden are in a class together with two little girls. They goof around and act crazy when they're supposed to be paying attention, but it's a blast to see them share their first activity together. I think the overall content of this class is much better than their old ones where they did the exact same thing over and over and over again. They work on a variety of skills and seem to get a lot more time with the teacher. However, the pool is colder and so poor Aiden was shivering like crazy last week. I plan to take their swim shirts tomorrow...maybe that will help a little. Logan....well....I'm starting to understand that Logan isn't comfortable with change and has a bit of his mom's fear of failure. The second week of class, he sat on the edge and refused to go in until I threatened to take him to the locker room to get dressed if he wasn't going to participate. Last week, he was very upset when I told him it was swim day. I gave him a little space and went about getting the other boys ready for our day. A little while later, I found him, sat with him and asked him to please explain to me why he didn't want to go to swim. Well...it seems that he's afraid he's not going to do it right. I guess the repetition of the other class was comforting after all. I explained that no one does something right the first time they try and that's why you go to a class. The teacher is there to help you so you just pay attention to her, practice on the side of the pool and do your best. If you aren't sure that you're doing it right, ask her to help you - that's why she's there! I was so proud of him! He did exactly what I suggested and was even trying everything on the side while he watched the other kids. During our discussion at home before we left, he also mentioned that he felt a little frustrated at karate. He joined in the middle of a testing session (hard to explain), but the whole class is about to start over again so he's going to be just fine. We decided together that I would tape the class so that we could work on the moves at home together...not to make him the best in the class or anything like that, just to make him comfortable because he LOVES going to karate and I want him to have fun.

So wow - I had more stuff to write about, but that was a lot! I'll talk about some more of last week's stories another day! I do have pictures though!!

One day during lunch, Aiden wanted some of his stretchy lizards with him at the table. He also thought they should have some food. I found our left over Halloween sprinkles, picked out some mini candy bats for the lizards and put them in a bowl. I thought they sort of looked like bugs (which is what we always talk about lizards having for lunch). Aiden made sure each of his pets had at least one "bug bat" to eat.

That same day Logan brought one of his McDonald's Bakugans to lunch. This little guy obviously needed food too so he got the orange sprinkle part of the "sprinkle mix" (this is what's left over after you pick out the bats so it worked out well...)

Have I mentioned how the boys love to steal my camera!? I had a LOT of crazy pictures to delete from last week. This one made me laugh! Logan and his friends on the street have a crazy exchange program going on where they trade toys or "borrow" from each other all the time. I usually have a pile of "things to return" on my counter top. Logan was obsessed with this batman for like 2 days. It belongs to AJ. Inspired by his love, we added a batman toy to his Christmas list :)

We have a new tradition at the 554 these days...invented by Logan (wow...this is a Logan-heavy post!) Anyway, last week we made homemade soup with cheese bread for dinner on Friday night. It was a chilly fall evening and it seemed right! That night, Logan was eating his soup and said, "Hey! I have an idea! Every Friday, let's make soup and have grilled cheese sandwiches! We'll call it soup Friday!" Brian loves cooking and we all love soup (not to mention grilled cheese or cheese toast) so we decided it was an excellent idea. This past Friday, Logan requested Tomato soup. Brian made an amazing version of an old favorite which included bacon, mushrooms, cream, a little gin and diced tomatoes. He also made his own focaccia bread. I'm such a lucky girl! :) Anyone remember our grand plans to make a family cookbook complete with pictures? I think we're going to simplify that idea and start with a Soup Friday book.

Here is the yummy bread!

Logan and daddy getting ready to chow down.

And now to Brady news:

theyyyyyy'rrrre baaa-aaack - the long forgotten Thomas trains! Logan loved, loved, loved, loved (get it??) Thomas when he was Brady's age. It started at 16 months and ended about a year later. In that time, we accumulated a lot of trains, a train table and tons of wooden track. These days we have GeoTrax LAND in the basement which all three boys enjoy. I even recently moved the train table to Aiden's room for his marble run. Bear saw Thomas on TV one day and has been requesting it frequently. Aiden and Logan will sit and watch it as well so it's definitely a go-to crowd pleaser. Today, Brady found one of the wooden Thomas trains and was rolling it along the floor. I got the rest of the trains out of the hallway closet, set up a track on the floor in the foyer and he played with it ALLLLL day long (save for the 2 hours we went out to see the movie Astro Boy in the morning <-- very cute movie by the way, and during his nap)

In this picture, he is pointing to the trains and saying "my trains!" Other things frequently heard: "tains tains! go tains! hoo hoo!" <-- that is Brady's train sound! He will often get frustrated while trying to hook them all together on the track. He'll find one of us, do a "come with me" motion and say "help - tains!" Logan was a doll and helped him out a lot today when mom and dad were busy.

The tree in our backyard is shedding pine cones like crazy. Some of the (older) neighborhood boys have been throwing them around and my kids have followed suit. This afternoon, Brian went out and collected a bunch of them with the boys. He found a craft on the Internet, which I then did with them (crafts are not Brian's strong suit). These are pine cone owls. Cute...not too hard to make!

The pipe cleaners and pom poms we have on hand in the house are all in Christmas colors so our owls look a little like they belong on Seasame Street :)

While putting up the Halloween decorations outside last week, I started humming "it's the most wonderful time of the year" and I've had it stuck in my head ever since. I do apologize to those who associate that phrase and song with Christmas. While that particular holiday is wonderful, enchanting, tons of fun and a time to celebrate life & family...Halloween is just darn FUN and I love it! Maybe it's because so much imagination and creativity is involved...maybe it's the candy...maybe it's all the good memories I have from childhood trick-or-treating. Whatever it is, I'm happy it's October and time to dig out the ol' orange and black.

Of course we got things kicked off with our camping trip last weekend so we were already in costume/candy/Halloween story mode as the first of October hit on Thursday. Here were some events from our week:

Wednesday, September 30th - get Halloween decorations from basement, start unpacking and taking inventory

Thursday, October 1st - put up indoor and outdoor decorations, remove all the window clings from the sliding glass door and start working on some bats, pumpkins and other assorted Halloween stuff! Experiment on candy from last weekend. I only have one picture from that event and it's on my phone, but we submerged skittles in water and saw how the S on the top floats away intact, tested the acidic level of nerds candies by dissolving them in water and sprinkling the water with baking soda. Then we microwaved some starbursts. We have a few more experiments planned after the 31st. I want to try the density rainbow at http://www.candyexperiments.com/ - pretty cool!! Thursday night, Brian made a batch of chili which seemed perfect for the autumn weather.

Friday, October 2nd - made pumpkin spice pretzels, bat-shaped peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for lunch, made cut out Halloween sugar cookies, made all-time favorite pumpkin cookies

I don't think we'll be able to keep up this pace for the next 27 days, but we're off to a good start celebrating...well...the most wonderful time of the year ;)

Here are the bat PB&Js. I have found that cutting out fun shapes leads to more actual food consumption by all three boys. I usually cut out stars, but bats are super cool!
I found a quick and easy recipe for pretzels and Hershey kisses in a Target brochure that I saved from last year. It was a great cooking project for the boys. They did a fantastic job unwrapping the candies and placing them carefully on each pretzel. A few did end up in tummies of course...including mine! These kisses are pumpkin spice flavor! Apparently only sold at Target.
I put almonds on some of them. They're now in the fridge and are quite yummy. I'm thinking I might experiment with other kiss flavors...maybe dark chocolate or a peppermint flavor during Christmas...maybe caramel :)

Working on Halloween window clings

bats, a haunted house...um....and a basketball :)

Dark picture, but I finally found a good use for these super cute indoor lanterns. I feel like I have an interesting lack of decorating space in our house. I set these up on shoe boxes covered with black felt in the dining room and put those battery-powered lights inside of them.

Another not-so-great picture of the outdoor decorations. Lights are hard to photograph. These are mostly the same ones we took camping with a couple more items that I didn't drag to our camp site.

Not all that exciting, but here's my Halloween wreath.

And here is a sign I made with an Uppercase Living transfer.

Sugar shock! These puddles of icing are actually covering cut-out cookies that the boys made. They are quite tasty....and induce brief periods of high energy followed by a dramatic

drop in activity level (kidding!)And finally...pumpkin cookies (more like pumpkin bread in cookie form). We used to have a cookie jar just like this one when I was growing up and it was often filled with these cookies. I'm sure my mom still has it (right mom?) When I saw it at Target last week...it was so nostalgic for me that I couldn't resist.

Happy Halloween!!

We just got back from our 2nd annual "Halloween" camping trip. We had so much fun last year that we just had to do it again! Last time, we went with one other family. We recruited one more this time around which made 6 adults and 8 kids. During an outdoor play session back in August, Ella and I were talking about costume ideas for the weekend (I think she was excited about her upcoming camping trip!). I suggested that we try to think of something everyone could do together...like um...a pack of crayons or something. She loved it, the other kids gave their vote of approval and the moms started planning!

I made the most colorful trip to Jo-Ann fabrics and got tons of felt for the costumes. Then I made a "crayola" stencil by taping letters together from a pack of purchased alpha stencils and used fabric paint to decorate each crayon. The only hard part about the costumes was making sure they fit each individual child. Since we have a slight range in height, broadness and um...booty size, I had to make sure to measure each kid and try the costumes on several times before Susan and I were able to sew on the back hooks. Susan made the hats (see pictures). We opened one party hat, used that as a pattern to cut out a piece of each color and glued them to more party hats (thank you Lipnick department store <-- that's Susan's basement!) using tacky glue. We even assembled a giant crayon box (again...see pictures!)

Before we left, Susan, Anne and I used fabric paint to make tee shirts for ourselves that we planned to tie-dye at the campsite. Mine said "Who Let The Crayons Out?". Susan's said "Crayons Gone Wild" and Anne sported "Crayon Control"
Unfortunately, Brian had a business meeting in Wisconsin on Friday and wasn't going to be able to get to the camp site until around 8pm...way too late to do any set up. My plan was to take the older boys with me earlier than everyone else and do what I could to get the tent up and our gear unloaded. Grandpa stayed at our house while Brady napped and then took him to spend the night with him and Meemaw. Pete decided to take the Lipnick gear out and set up his tent early as well. Despite a forecast for rain the whole weekend, it looked good Friday afternoon so we packed up and left. It started raining the MINUTE we parked our cars at the site. We set up a pop-up shelter in the rain, dragged one of the picnic tables under it and unloaded what we could. We even started some tent assembly under there. After a while, we decided to just go for it. We got a little wet, Aiden & Logan wouldn't stay in the car watching the movie I had for them so they got a little wet as well, but it stopped raining as we were finishing up the tents and it never rained again. The weather was actually wonderful, no where near as cold as last year! I also packed a bunch of Halloween decorations that we bought at the end of last season..thank you Target! (I can't wait to put these up in the yard!)

Here's the gate where we set up the candy hand-out during trick or treating. They have a camp site decorating contest (and there are some people who go ALL out). Surprisingly, we won 3rd place for the tent camping sites (the seasonal renters had their own contest). Pretty funny! I was sort of impressed with myself because I had to unbox all this stuff last weekend and figure out how many cords I needed. Brian gave me our outdoor timer and I managed to set it all up to go on and off at specific times of the day.
The boys did a GREAT job going to bed and staying asleep the whole night on Friday! Aiden was so exhausted that he was pretty much snoring as his head hit the pillow. The other families were still getting ready for bed and he was OUT. Logan went down easily as well. Brian and I emerged from our tent before the other parents and we did a "this never happens to us" celebratory dance because we were the first ones done. The boys were, however, the first ones up in the morning. They were happy to see each other and did some spontaneous hugging before I rushed them off to the showers in an effort to keep the site as quiet as possible for any other still-sleeping campers.

After a breakfast of cereal and bagels, two groups, including our family, had to rush off for soccer stuff. The camp site is only about 25 minutes from our house and we needed to get Bear anyway. Logan and Aiden did their classes, we picked up Bray and went back to camp some more! OH...and the cereal was so fun...Brian had the idea to buy Count Chocula, Boo Berry and Franken-berry for the Halloween theme.

Brady is here! He loves Mackenzie's pink chair and spent a lot of time in it!

The kids always love running, running, running around the forest, but Susan and I decided after our last trip that we needed some more structured activities. She brought a TON of awesome crafts and coloring pages. I wrote up a photo and collection scavenger hunt while Susan supplied all kinds of awesome gear like magnifying glasses, little play binoculars, whistles, GI Joe masks and bags. Here, she hands out the goodies.

Here is the list I typed up for each team. They had to take pictures of things like a witch, a monster, a pumpkin, something black and white, an insect etc. They had to collect things like a bottle cap, a piece of candy, a yellow leaf, a cool rock and a stick shaped like a Y. Each mom took a team (Logan and Aiden wanted to be together so I ended up with team Houck) and we set a time limit of 20 minutes. It was a blast, especially with all the decorations to check out.

Here is Logan, testing out the binoculars.

The 6 big kids ready to roll (everyone had on their Halloween shirts too!)

AJ and Aiden

Here are some of the pictures Logan took during our hunt: the pumpkin

The insect (we actually took about 4 pictures of different insects...it was hard to keep them on task at times)

The witch....she was on my shirt (totally legal...we said we could include things we were wearing in the pictures).

A victorious team Houck heading back to camp with a fully checked list. :) I'm pretty sure that each team finished the search. We never had time to check because it was time to get dressed for the costume parade! Do you think the kids even noticed that we didn't "finish"? Nope...the hunt was the fun!

So....here is our "practice" session at camp. Susan, Anne and I figured that we needed to tape 2 big packing boxes together so that everyone could fit inside. We left one end open and the whole thing folded accordian style for easy carrying through the costume parade. Pete had the paint store match the color to an actual crayon box. I used my copier to enlarge pieces of a copied crayon-box image and glued them, along with two different kinds of green felt, to the box. Susan and I cut the edges to make it have an upper and a lower level. The kids weren't allowed to have their hats until we were ready to parade. Each child had one and only one hat; we feared someone would have a breakage before we headed out...

Logan and Aiden getting ready for the parade!

Brian manned the camera during the parade (The moms were adjusting our own shirts and bringing up the rear). He got some great shots!

AHHHHHH....It really IS Crayons Gone Wild!

I thought this picture was so funny....we were running to catch up. I am obviously hamming it up for the camera. I included this shot because it's a good one of our shirts. They had a tie-dye pattern called "polka dots" which took a LONG time, but it looked like we were splattered with spots of paint...perfect for the moms of the crayon gang. Our shirts were NOT dry in time, but smart Susan remembered there were paid dryers, ran them up and had them ready just in time to start the parade.
Brady got a ride pretty much the entire time. He is such a grampy's boy! So...story on his costume: I had wanted to make him red and experimented the final design on dark blue, which was supposed to be Aiden's costume. It ended up fitting Brady much better than Aiden (I made the rest of the costumes a bit longer so Aiden's looked too short). I had to beg, plead and bargain with A to be light blue. He finally conceded, BUT insisted on wearing Brady's dark blue hat during the parade...funny!

We also had some problems getting AJ or Logan to be any color other than green. Logan is actually darker green while AJ is a Kelly green...MacKenzie chose lime green so we had a very blue & green-heavy box o' crayons :) Here, Brian had them make funny faces....

...and then they had a group hug! We were waiting for their turn up on stage during the costume contest. They do individuals first by age group and then the family/group costumes. Last year we let them go up with the individuals and then again during the group section. We just waited until the end this year so we had a lot of time to kill around the stage.

They were all so excited to get up there! Here, Susan arranges them in 2 rows so we can unfold their box around them.

We planned to put Matthew (pictured in Anne's arms in yellow) on the floor next to the box. He only stayed there for about a minute. Brady didn't even want in the box and refused to wear his "point". I just held him in the back with Matt. We found out today (Sunday) that they won first place!

Aiden, with the proper hat, trick-or-treating. The kids all tie-dyed pillow cases again this year for candy gathering. I thought the best part of trick or treating was walking around the entire camp checking out all the decorations. I am NOT kidding....some people seriously go all out with monsters, blow-up things, giant spiders that they drop from trees to make the kids laugh...

Grandpa had Brady on a "treat" and "eat" plan. He would get a piece of candy, walk and eat it, then get another one farther down the road. It worked very well!

Here he is learning the ropes! He even said "tank too" (thank you) after he got each piece.

Back at camp, we had a little movie time while dinner was prepared. Brian packed this TV as an emergency, in case it rains and there isn't anywhere to go but inside the tents, activity. He brought along the Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin Movie.

...and it was a hit.

After we lost the kids to the woods again...Susan brought out another treat - silly string! They all had a little fight around our tents...and then ran off again :)

Mackenzie and Ella spraying each other.

After that whole day of fun, the kids all went to bed very well...even the parents turned in relatively early. Aiden woke up first the next day. Again, in an effort not to wake everyone, I drove with him into the nearest town and bought a big box of coffee for the camp site (plus my little errand-runner earned a donut for his assistance). The dads made a wonderful breakfast for the adults (eggs, bacon, cheese and hashbrowns all mixed together...yum!), but the kids elected to have cereal again. We packed up and left by 11:30 to pick up Brady. The Lipnicks represented at the costume and site decorating results thing and brought home the news of our victories. All in all, a fantastic, fun and very successful camping trip!

Back at home: I had to take a picture of the boys because they were SO muddy. It's hard to tell how dirty they really are though. Since it was raining a lot the week before our trip, the whole wooded area behind our sites was slippery and muddy. In fact, Ella got stuck in he mud about 3 minutes after the Iwinski family arrived. I slipped and landed on my rear at one point and my kids were pretty much confined to gross and dirty cloths. I changed them several times, but it was a matter of minutes until they slipped again and re-mucked themselves. When we got into the house, I had them take everything off in the laundry room and go straight to the bath. I rinsed them and then had to drain/refill the tub so they could play a little. The water got muddy brown almost immediately. Ahhh....but isn't that the point of camping? hah.