Take a closer look

Yeah, I know. All you see is a bunch of leaves completely covering up our driveway and sidewalk. But take another look.
Ok, I'll break out the zoom lens here.

Yay! Our first deer sighting at our house. I've seen lots while out running, but none right next to our car like that. I looked out our bedroom window this afternoon and saw a deer browsing through our bushes. I showed it to Elise and she loved it and we went outside to look at it before she scared it off.

Oh, and I was shamed into raking those leaves up for an hour afterwards, even though I know they'll just be back.

Birthday girl

Elise’s birthday is the day after Halloween, and to be honest, it’s kind of a pain. I know it could be worse, on Christmas or Thanksgiving, or Columbus Day, but I get into the Halloween zone and kind of forget about her birthday. We get home from trick or treating and all I want to do is go through the candy and pick out all the good stuff, but I still have presents to wrap, decorations to put up, and a cake to plan.

I've been thinking about starting her in some sort of dance class for a little while and when some other girls we know decided to sign up for one we decided to along with it too. Luckily for us, the first class was on her birthday so we went along with it and told her it was all part of her birthday present. She looked so cute in the dress she picked out and was spinning around all morning in it. Her class went pretty well. She hasn't shown a huge amount of natural talent for it, but it’s only for 6 weeks and she’s having fun so it doesn’t matter. And it puts a smile on your face Saturday mornings to see 8 little girls prancing about in ballet dresses.


She saw a Barbie cake at the grocery store a few months ago and was very impressed by it so I thought I would give it a shot, though Ben really wanted to do this cake for some reason. I am horrible at decorating and I had some issues with drippy homemade frosting, but she loved it. Opening presents took forever because she wanted to play with every single thing immediately but she got plenty of new books and toys to at least keep her busy for another month until Christmas hits. We got her this Princess laptop with a bunch of learning games which I know she likes because I had to take it away to punish her for something yesterday and she completely flipped out for about 15 minutes. That was fun.





Looking back on this year, I can't believe how much she has changed. She has become her own little independent person who now talks back to her mother and bullies her baby sister and will only eat Life cereal. But along with that she loves to cuddle and read books, she's incredibly generous with her hugs and kisses, she gets so excited over the littlest things, and mostly is just the cutest thing ever and scares me with how much she learns every day.

Halloween finally

Our computer crashed last week and even though we got everything up and running again the next day, the one thing that didn't work was the internet. Computers are funny right? Anyway, we finally got everything up and running and I am back to play catch up.

The girls had lots of fun on Halloween. I didn’t want to revisit the sushi costume with Chloe so I tried to put her in a few different things lying around the house. She was very anti-costume and resisted strongly being put into anything so finally I threw her in Elise’s ballet leotard I had just bought and there was no crying so one girl was done. I asked Elise if she wanted to be a Japanese princess again or Snow White and she said Snow White so we threw her in last year’s costume and away we went.

I wasn’t sure how long the girls would last since they both had colds and we already had plenty of candy from the trunk or treat, but after going to a few of the neighbors’ houses they were loving it so we decided to go to another neighborhood more conducive to trick or treating (all the houses in our neighborhood are kind of spread out and have long driveways). By the time we finished in the other neighborhood, Chloe was spitting out an approximation of “trick or treat” at every house and a pretty good “thank you” too. She was super excited and wanted to walk everywhere all by herself.

Elise was cute and told everyone she was Snow White. I was worried some of the houses were a little too scary for her. There was a house with 2 boys with scary masks passing out candy but they took their masks off and she said, “Silly boys,” and laughed really hard to herself so I guess she was fine.


I’m glad the girls had fun, but now we are stuck with way too much candy.

Exhibit A:



Exhibit B:

Those plastic pumpkins hold way more candy than they should.



Comparing candy the next morning. This was before they really realized what it was they were holding.

Sushi-phobia

When I was in college, I used to make sushi sometimes for social functions and there were invariably people there who refused to eat it. Maybe it was the seaweed or the suspected association with raw fish, or even the smell of the rice; there was just something about sushi that bothered to them to the point where they wouldn’t even try it.*

I’m afraid that Chloe is now one of these sushi-phobic people. I spent several hours putting together an adorable HANDMADE Halloween sushi costume for her. And either it was the claustrophobic large cardboard roll, or the smell of the Styrofoam peanuts, but something about the costume screamed no way to her. Our ward’s Halloween party was the Wednesday before Halloween. I put the costume on her that afternoon to make sure it fit ok and she punched out the front panel. I knew the costume was doomed, but the selfish part of motherhood kicked in. I spent hours on that costume and she was still young enough to be able to force her to wear it. So we took it to the ward party and we put it on her for a little bit. She looked so cute, but she bawled the whole time, unless I was forcing candy down her throat, so we took her out of it after a while. Elise wore a cute little kimono. I told her she was a Japanese princess and she was adorable. I wish we had taken more pictures of her, but we were so focused on getting pictures of Chloe while she was still in the costume that we skimped on Elise. She had fun running around and getting way too much candy.

As for Chloe, I’m hoping this incident doesn’t have any sushi repercussions, though luckily she had no idea what her costume was so I think we’re ok.

*Other notable sushi-phobes: My brother’s 5th grade class. He used to ask my mom to give him sushi for lunch so he could gross out his entire class when he opened his lunchbox.