Talents, Halloween, and, to top it all off, a road trip!

I have the wonderful opportunity of serving with my friend Amy as the Activity Days leader for the girls in our ward. Kenzi is in activity days for a few more months and so I also get to enjoy the activities with her as well. A couple of weeks ago we had a Talent Show. It was a great experience for the girls to bring a talent to share and explain their talent to us. I was AMAZED at the amount of talent in our girls.

As you can see from the picture above we had six girls attend.

We had three different musical instruments played for us, Kenzi sang and brought her prize winning stories for display. We had scrapbook pages, sewing, baking, and art projects!

These girls are sooo talented and so blessed and they blessed our lives by being willing to share their talents with us. I have a video of Kenzi singing but it is too big, I need to figure out a way to make it smaller and then I will post it.

Now for Halloween!

We had a mixture of characters as you can see....

No agreeing on a theme in this bunch, well okay, Luke didn't have a choice or he might have sided with Jax. Raggedy Andy is my very favorite boy costume we own so he didn't have much of a choice. The ONLY thing I like about Halloween is dressing up. However, I have to admit, that it was funner when they were younger and I pretty much could just choose what was cute and help my mom make it! Luke really didn't hate his costume as much as you might guess from all his pictures. He had just woke up, was HUNGRY, and we were in a hurry to make it to a trunk-or-treat, so he was ticked that we wasn't getting food right now! Once he got to eat he was great and left his wig on the whole time. Can you guess what Kenzi is? Well maybe I'll tell you when we get to the individual pictures if you haven't figured it out by then. Oh I'll just do that with the other two as well. LOL Because they aren't obvious.

This year we had a Halloween party. It was the day after Halloween but it was still pretty fun. It was a family Halloween party so I let each of the kids pick a family to invite and we had fun games that we played in teams of families. Below are the decorations. Yep, none other than our creative little Jacee girl, (speaking of talents) made them. Oh, with the exception of the paper lantern you see in the picture below. We bought that and the pumpkin garland.

Pumpkin carving was great this year! I had play practice so I helped get the pumpkin carving going and Kenzi and I had to leave (DARN) LOL just kidding. I actually enjoy carving but not the mess! Karl had to carve Luke's pumpkin below. Luke quickly lost interest.

Jax's (bet you couldn't guesss!) pumpkin turned out great. He did it all by himself!

Kenzi's turned out way cute. She also did hers all by herself.

Jacee's looked cute but she insisted on having help! LOL She didn't want to ruin it! How funny, aren't we already ruining the pumpkins? LOL

Luke, loosing interest!

OK, here's my little Sacajawea with her papoose, of course!

Ok, he's not just a solider! Do you give up? Come one think Jax?

OK, OK

He's SPECIAL FORCES! LOL

And you probably won't guess her completely right. Kenzi is a country singer!

Go Figure!

Below is a picture of our wrap the mummy relay game. The object was to pick a person in your family, wrap two rolls of toilet paper around them and send them across the room. The first one to the other end of the room is the winner!

The winner was the Jesperson Family!

Way to go! You look very mummyish Emily!

Next on the game list was, hmmm, what was the name of this game.

Ummm, Throw the candy corn in the cup. Whoever has the most candy corns wins the game.

As you can see from the picture the person wearing the cup felt a little insecure! LOL

Thanks to Trevor of the Gunderson family, the Fausett family won that game. Trevor enjoyed packing the candy corns and putting them in the Fausett family cup. LOL

Next was Hot Potato Laundry Bag.

We passed around laundry bags full of dress up items if the music stopped while you were holding the bag you had to draw something out of the bag and put it on.

These were the results:

The Fausett Family

The Jessperson Family who tied as the winners of this game! Love, love, love, Mark's get up!

The Gunderson Family

The other tied winners of this game!

And lastly, the Kraync Klan

Lastly my kids had begged to have a silly sting war so I bought each child a can of silly string and they had a great time out back shooting each other with string! Below is a picture of Mason covered in silly sting.

We had a great time at our party!

Thanks everyone for coming!

We were pleasantly surprised when my brother Chad brought his family and came home for the weekend. It was so great to see them. Below are some pictures of their family. Jax and Kyler were fighting. It was pretty funny. Kyler is a little toughie! He is soooo funny and dang cute!

Here is a picture of precious Tanner with Jacee and Chad.

We had the opportunity to go on a VERY LONG road trip with Karl. We went to Casper Wyoming, through Vernal then back down to Rifle Colorado and home through Grand Junction, Colorado, 1200 miles in all! Here are some pictures of the things we saw on our way! The rainbow was beautiful. Full and bright. We could even see where it ended. In fact the end of the rainbow followed us a long way. I didn't get a picture of that end of the rainbow but it was beautiful. It was a double rainbow also. I couldn't fit them both in the camera.

Just a cute picture of Jax chillin' and Gracie having a nap.

OK, here is what I learned or should I say remembered as we were driving to Casper.....

I never want to live in Wyoming! LOL No offense to anyone who HAS to! LOL

On our way back from Casper headed to Wyoming we stopped at Martins Cove. We were the only visitors there. It was cold and we didn't stop to go on the trail but just to let mom and dad look at the visitors center and find information about camping here next year and doing a Trek as a family.

The deer were so pretty and only about 15 feet away from Jacee for this picture.

Elder and Sister Thomas!

Do these guys look familiar to any of you?

Probably not but they did to us and it was sooo good to see them. Sister Thomas served as my first counselor in Primary in our Wellington Ward. I just love these two people. I admire them soooo much. I cannot say enough good about them. I knew they had gotten called on a mission here but I expected them to be gone by the time we got there. Last I heard they had only been called on a 6 month mission. But, to our pleasant surprise they had been asked to extend their mission for another year so they were still there when we stopped. It was a sweet blessing to get to see them.

LOL, what is this?

It's not Halloween, Just Gracie being played with, or in her thoughts, tortured.

I thought this was a sweet protrayal of my two middle children actually getting along for a brief moment. They are cooking pasta over the campfire. LOL I know it is taking the self suffcient thing to the extreme a little but they loved it! I will have to remember to get pictures of my dad and Jax and the fishing. Then you will wonder about us and the self sufficient thing! LOL