Fall decorations

Over the past few weeks Caitlin and I have been MEGA-CRAFTERS. I cannot show everything we have made because they may show up under certain people's christmas trees this year but here are a few of our fall decorations.

My "Give Thanks" sign- I do not have a finished picture of it, but this is the work in progress photo.

My $4 fall wreath. I LOVE the little owls- they are so cute.

Caitlin and I searched all over (in the stick pile that we put in the back of Aaron's truck) for these one of a kind masterpieces. (you can see my sign in the background- I still need to mod podge my turkey on it)

We found a bag of stones at Deals for $1

and a super discounted fall foliage bouquet at Hobby Lobby (I think it was 74 cents)

 We carefully plucked the leaves off of the plastic stems and Caitlin cut the ends off (yes I let her use scissors- I am finally over the haircut incident that happened when she was 2 1/2)

 Caitlin picked out where to put the leaves and I super glued them on.

Ta Da!! The finished product. I was going to put this on my shelf, but it ended up being a little bit larger than I had anticipated.



We are drowning in leaves

Aaron is out of town this week and it just happened to be gorgeous outside on Sunday. It is probably the last time this year that Caitlin and I will get to play outside with our warm, bright, and beautiful friend (the sun).


First, I cleaned all the gutters out. It took quite awhile and I am deathly afraid of standing on the roof to do any repairs/maintenance so I had to move the ladder every two feet all the way around the house. I got quite a work out going up and down the ladder 6,587,246 times.

After I tackled the nasty gutters it was time to start on the leaves. As as adult I have never had to rake leaves. We owned our house for 7 years (we sold it this past spring) and that entire time all of the leaves blew into everyone else's yard. Actually, the entire neighborhood's trees did that and I don't remember ever seeing anyone raking leaves. We all had HUGE trees and I cannot figure out what happened to all of those leaves. Hmmm... sometimes mysteries are not meant to be solved.

Anyways, back to our current house... the leaves have been piling up in the yard and what really sucks is that there are still a lot of leaves left in our trees. I really enjoyed the color change this year. We have two very very very large trees in the yard and they both turned to the most beautiful shades of yellowish red. My little helper came out and helped me gather all the leaves (because I tricked her and said she could jump in them if she helped) and sack them up. I used the leaf blower while Caitlin raked. We had two piles we were working on. One pile was all the leaves in the front of the house and the larger pile was on the side of the house. I had no idea we had so many leaves. I also had no idea our yard was so big!

Here is a picture of one of the first leaf jumps of the day. Caitlin was cracking me up because she would get a 10-20 foot running start to jump in.

She kept saying she was swimming in the leaves... 

My baby hard at work!

 She has a very unique style of raking.

This is the best photo that Caitlin got of me jumping in.

I suppose I should have tried to clean the sludge from the gutters off of me before I posed for pictures.

Look how pitiful she is... she did not want to stop playing.

This usually works on daddy, but not mommy.

I made an agreement with her- we sack 2 bags of leaves and then it was playtime.

 Somehow she kept "falling" while we were sacking the leaves.

Look how little the pile is!! This pic is after several rounds of "sack 2 bags, play a little"

 Where's Waldo Caitlin?

We only got one side of the house and the front yard bagged up. I cannot believe that is all we got done because there are 14 large black yard bags of leaves sitting in my drive way but I cannot physically do anymore this week. I could barely move today and the stairs at work to my office almost killed me.

On the brighter side...

I will never forget this day. We had soooooo much fun and I got to see my baby big girl smile and laugh all day! These are the moments I live for.



We're off to see the Wizard...

This weekend Caitlin and I got to go to see a musical. My mini- me and I LOVE musicals so we were absolutely thrilled. For weeks we were anticipating how great it would be. This play was at Nixa High School. I know most people hear High school play and think it will be a mediocre production but not at this school. The theatre budget is quite large and they know what they are doing there!! At Nixa HS, they go all out on the sets, curtains, choreography (they hired a pro to teach tap dancing for this play), singing, lights, sound-- well I think you get the picture. Every year I am shocked at all the different things they come up with and the talent they seem to find at the school. They even bring in elementary kids to be a part of the play. This year they used wire lifts for flying effects. They were pretty neat. We got to see all the witches enter and exit through the "sky". Cooper liked the flying monkeys and crows. The jitterbugs were so cute and one even did a little bit of acrobatics.

Last year we saw Beauty and the Beast (B and the B was the first Nixa play Caitlin saw). The moment the play started- I could tell Caitlin was going to love it. She got so excited over all of the little things. Here she is with Belle after the play...

I get so excited when I get to go to Nixa to see the musicals. I can still remember going there as a kiddo and seeing the amazing stories come to life. I will never forget the Sound of Music and Once Upon a Mattress (just to name a few). I am so glad that my daughter likes loves music and the silliness of musical theatre. I love how I feel when I am watching a play. I always get sucked into them and they seem so real. I feel the characters pain and laughter. I love the scenes where everyone bursts out into song in the middle of a conversation and happen to have a perfectly choreographed dance to go along with the song. To put it simply, music and dancing makes me happy.

**We cannot take pictures during the show but afterwards we had to hunt down some of the kids favorite characters. Caitlin desperately wanted a picture with Toto. It cracks me up because there were so many human beings that she could get her pic with but all she was really concerned about was finding the dog.

My nephew, Caitlin, and my fantastic mom!! 

Glinda the good witch of the north

Dorothy

The Wicked Witch of the west-- she was hilarious with all her different facial expressions. I still cannot believe she actually rode her bike through the air.

Erin the Jitterbug and TOTO.  FINALLY WE FOUND TOTO!!!

After we found the dog, the kids were ready to go. They were done with pictures.

The Tooth Fairy

I let Caitlin pick her Halloween costume every year. Sometimes I have to persuade her to go in another direction, but this year the outfit she choose was unique and cute. I have been wanting to try out the make your own tutu thing for quite awhile and this outfit was perfect for it. Her inspiration started a few months ago when we watched the movie Tooth Fairy. I was scared that she wanted to look all bad and buff like Dwayne Johnson did in the movie, but to my delight she wanted to look pretty. Oh thank goodness.

It took several weeks for her to decide what color tooth fairy she wanted to be. She was dead set on being a yellow fairy. (***Aaron and I were not too fond of a yellow fairy telling you to brush your teeth so your teeth wouldn't wind up being the same color of her outfit). But then she changed her mind to blue. I bought some blue tulle and it was no-where near enough so I had to go to the store and buy more (at 10:45 at night- my friend Kari and I were spending the evening crafting). When I was there I found the pink wings and decided to change the whole color scheme. Caitlin was already asleep and I would finish the whole thing up before she woke up anyways.

After lots of hard work this is what she looked like...

she ended up loving all of the pink stuff. We curled her hair and sprayed a gallon of glitter on her and she looked beautiful.

This is one of my childhood cats. His name is Frog and he is 13 or 14 years old now, but still as love able as ever!

Caitlin had to make sure to pet all of the cats at my Dad's house.

Caitlin wanted Aaron to be Perry the platypus from Phineas and Ferb. We even found a t-shirt with the perry face on it (because Aaron will only wear t-shirts as his costumes)

but he refused to wear the shirt so instead he was just Aaron...

The Halloween costume Caitlin picked out for me was a devil.. I even had a tail. ( I wonder what she was trying to tell me by picking this costume out)

After visiting the grandparents (or at least one set of grandparents) it was time to trick or treat with my best friend Kari and her daughter Aspen. I can not believe Aspen left the makeup on all night. it made me laugh because we have such a prissy tooth fairy and then an ugly (but still cute) green faced witch with a huge mole.

Halloween 2010 was a huge success. The girls had a blast!!

Is there a support group out there for me?

After many successful years of bargain shopping for Christmas presents I have finally realized that I have a problem... a shopping problem.

It is always a tradition that my family and I spend Thanksgiving night memorizing the black Friday ads. My devotion to black Friday shopping has gotten so bad that I have convinced my sister in law (Vicki) that she cannot live without it. She has gone with me twice- the first year I think we went to one store and we were done (because I had the urge to shop but no one else had that urge). However, last year we were in line at Old Navy by 2:30 (I think it was 2:30 and they opened at 3) searching for my nephews girlfriend that had convinced us to go there. Well Megan was a no show but in her place was her awesome mom.

After old navy we went to Wal-mart. Oh, my beloved Wal-Mart.
****In Springfield my favorite Wal-mart (the one on west Sunshine) hands you a map of where all the early bird sale items in the ad are located in the store. Lets just say THEY ARE AWESOME!!!! The customer service in Spfld is amazing- the employees help you find items and if they do not know where it is... here is the kicker... the use the walkie talkies and find out for you. Also, they let you wait inside the store instead of outside in the freezing cold.*****

In Columbia most people hate Wal-Mart- after my horrendous experience there on BLACK FRIDAY 2009 I now understand. You see the Como people never get to experience the amazing Wal-Mart that I have grown to love, no no... they experience the true version of the "White Trash Wal-Mart". This Wal-Mart experience was like a scene out of a movie--- a bad Christmas movie! I remember we walked in and I kept looking for the friendly greeters with the map of the store. They were no where to be found. The layout of the sale items made no sense. There were sweatshirts in the food isles and movies in the kids section and not one employee knew what was going on. In fact, they flat out told me they did not care where anything was and I needed to find it myself. As I am typing this I am re-hashing all these horrible feelings from last year. AAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! During the shopping experience there were 2 couples that were hauled off in hand cuffs because they were fighting over an item. It was most likely a $5 item on sale for $2 and now they got to spend a lovely day in jail for being stupid. The checkout lines moved slower than a snail- only half of the checkouts were open and I don't think those people had ever worked the register before. The employees kept calling for the managers to come help out with every transaction. Finally after several hours we got out of that mess. It was worth it in the end because we ended up with A LOT of items!!

We went to several other stores after that but I don't recall any other horrible memorable things about the rest of the shopping day.

I have not decided if I am going out this year- I have vowed to try to make all of my presents but I still have to get the presents from Santa. Hmmm... what to do. I guess I will just have to study the ads Thanksgiving night (or stalk the black friday website hoping to find a barbie dream house in an ad) and then I will decide if I am going to go.

It's carving time

 I have said it before, fall is my favorite time of year!!! This is the first year Caitlin we have carved pumpkins in forever. Little miss is finally old enough to help out so it is fun again. She had been asking to carve pumpkins every night since we picked them out so we finally got around to it on Oct 30th. (We were down to the wire so we HAD to do it that day)

She was so excited to get the "guts" out of the pumpkins

We opted for the carving for dummies option and bought a carving kit that had stencils.

Caitlin choose a much harder design for Aaron to carve and his hands hurt for days afterwards because the little carving knives sure are not time efficient.

The finished product! SOOOO CUTE!!!

Don't worry- we saved the pumpkin seeds and baked them.

I would have taken a picture, but they did not last very long in this house. :)