Happy Halloween 2013

Happy Halloween y'all.

Pictures forthcoming if I ever manage to get the kitchen cleaned up from the pumpkin carving/candy bartering extravaganza that was our evening.

OK, 3 days later, here they are:

Brigham was a four-armed, 3-eyed mutant.  His fake arms are attached to his real arms with thread, so he can move them together.  It was pretty freaky looking.  He loved his costume, which made me really happy.  It didn't take me too long to put together-- just an extra black shirt that I cannibalized to make the four-armed shirt.
Brigham loves Halloween-- a kid after my own heart.  He begged me to get new Halloween decorations this year, since the ones we've had since he was a baby were too cutesy for him.  It was a fun project, and he heartily approved the outcome.  He decorated outside with spider webs and gravestones.  
He also pulled out an entire drawer full of candy that he had saved since last Halloween!   That kid takes saving to a whole new level.  Too bad it wasn't good after a year...

Joseph really didn't want to dress up this year.  But I'm not ready to have him grow up entirely, yet.  My last year dressing up was when I was 12, and he was going to dress up this year, gosh darn it!   Anyway, after lots of rejected suggestions, he agreed to be Batman-- as in baseball bat man.  :-)  I made the bat symbol with felt and sewed it onto a Salvation Army black shirt, and made another bat symbol for the back of his dracula cape.  He wore it willingly to the ward trunk-or-treat and got lots of comments.  I thought it was pretty clever.  I still remember the year he was a bat, and the next year when he was bat man.  Where did that cute little boy go??  Anyway, on Halloween night, he did NOT want to go trick-or-treating.  What??  No free candy??  But again, I was bound and determined to make him enjoy his last Halloween, so I MADE him put on his costume (which he strangely couldn't find until Ben picked it up from the floor of his closet), and MADE him go outside with us.  The other boys went to about 2 houses before he finally decided to go ahead and get some candy since he had to be out there anyway.  He and I went home a little early anyway, but I think he had fun.  He certainly got into the candy-bartering and trading afterward, anyway, which is half the fun of trick-or-treating.

Mosey knew what he wanted to be for several weeks before Halloween.  We're studying ancient history this year, and after our Egypt unit, he wanted to be King Tut.  I made the tunic and sash and bought the headpiece from amazon.  He had brown sandals as well but didn't want to go find them when we took the picture after coming home from trick-or-treating.  He is at a really great age for trick-or-treating enthusiasm.  Why can't all my kids stay nine years old forever??  I think it might be my favorite age.

And here are the three hooligans in all their Halloween-glory, right after video-chatting with Grandma Frandsen so she could see their costumes.  

We carved some pumpkins, too.  This is Brigham's.  He drew his out in meticulous detail before hand, and then spent about an hour and a half making it perfect.  I love it!

Mosey made a cat jack-o-lantern, to go along with his Egypt theme.  It was funny that Sola came to check it out right as I was taking pictures.  Wonder what she thought of it.

And anyone who knows Joseph is not surprised that this one is his.  He carved it out all himself, and then used about every knife I have to stab it in the face.  OK, then!  I'm trying not to be worried.  :-)

Here is my watermelon jack-o-lantern.  I bought a pineapple, but didn't have time to carve it because I decided to go trick-or-treating with Ben and the boys instead.  I'll have to do 2 next year.

So that was Halloween!  It was very fun, and now we have an enormous bowl of candy left over since we got exactly 3 knocks on our door with trick-or-treaters...  I left the bowl out on the porch when we went out as a family, but none was taken when we got back.  That's the sad thing about living around the corner on the very end of a small street-- no one even knows we are there!

10/21/2013 update

Going backwards:
1.  Last night we had our friends the Smiths over for dinner.  They are good friends and are moving to Arizona on Thursday.  It's a good thing for them, but sad for us.  Their son Andrew has been a good friend to my boys, and I know Mosey in particular will miss him.  Andrea was my cub scout co-leader, and has been a part of our  homeschooling group for the past year.  I hope all the best for them.

2.  Yesterday afternoon was Brigham's AYO fall concert.  We had to leave early from church (boo), but it was worth it-- great concert!  Brigham's orchestra pulled together 3 very well-done pieces in only 5 weeks of rehearsal.  I'm so glad he's getting this opportunity.

3.  Saturday afternoon we went to see Gravity and then out to eat at MiMi's Cafe.  We really enjoyed Gravity.  I've never seen a movie with only TWO actors (essentially only one).  It made me never, never want to go to space.  :-)  Going out to eat was an adventure.  Mosey hates going out to eat.  How is that possible?  We've spoiled him, that's how.  He thinks it takes too long and would rather eat food at home.  Joseph was a bit of a pill-- when we asked him where he wanted to go, he said, "Where ever Brigham wants to go, I don't want to go."  Nice.  So he didn't get a say.  :-)  As it is, we ended up liking the restaurant, even Mosey and Joseph.

4.  Saturday morning was the boys' Halloween piano recital.  Mosey dressed up as a Pharaoh and looked awesome.  He did a lot of the sewing on his costume by himself.  Brigham dressed up in his Army costume from last year, with the addition of a great pair of sunglasses.  He looked awesome, too.  Joseph didn't want to dress up.  I did manage to get him to wear his monster shirt that we got at Halloween last year, but that was it.  Ben got him to take along a cape and top hat (so he could be a "monster magician"), but apparently he took them off as soon as he got inside.  I am not enjoying this "I'm too cool for anything" version of Joseph these days!!  Where is my excited kid who loves Halloween??  I miss him.  :-(

5.  Friday afternoon the boys played airsoft with some friends.  Joseph and Brigham aren't getting along very well in their airsoft games...  Not sure what to do about that.  I want airsoft to continue to be something fun that they do together-- it is such a great facilitator for social activities with other kids!

6.  Joseph was sick for two days this past week. Boy is it easier to do school with two boys than three.  Ben was sick as well, so I think the two of them were sharing germs.  Joseph basically slept ALL DAY Wednesday and Thursday.  Of course, when I looked at the history of his computer and saw a couple of 3 AM sessions of World of Tanks, my confidence in the veracity of his illness was shaken a bit.  He's now under some fairly stringent computer regulations and under an enforced vacation from World of Tanks...  Man, it is complicated raising kids, especially pre-teens.

7.  A great deal of time this week was spent on the rezoning attempts on "our" forest.  I found out that the developer that bought the four acres on one side of the road is joining in with the owners of the 3 acres on the other side of the road to rezone from SF-1 (single-family large lot residences) to SF-6 (townhouse and condominium residence district), with the stated intention of building a condominium complex there.  It is impossible for me to adequately express how much I do not want this to happen.  It would be awful for our neighborhood, awful for our home values, awful for traffic around this entire area.  There is no upside.  So I took it upon myself to make sure all our neighbors know what is going on so we can organize and protest the rezoning.  In looking at the Austin zoning principles, I think we will have a pretty good case.  I have no idea if we can trust city council at all, but I guess we'll find out.  I made 100 or so flyers to take around to all the homes in our neighborhood, all the homes in the neighborhoods that back up onto the land, and the houses on the streets that connect onto ours that will be affected by increased traffic.  I have gotten to know some of the neighbors in doing this and if we succeed, it will make our neighborhood even closer.  Our whole neighborhood is pretty much up in arms about it.  It will be an interesting process, but I admit I have been kept up at night in horror, thinking about what would happen if they succeed in rezoning...

a few things from last week

Here are a few noteworthy things from last week:

1.  On Friday Brigham and Joseph and Ben went on a scout campout.  It poured here, but they didn't get any rain where they were, so that was good.  Mosey and I had a quiet evening in.  He didn't even want to go get pizza or anything, so we ate cereal and sandwiches at home and just vegged for a while.  Mosey told me ALL about World of Tanks.  Well, not all about, since there is always more to tell.  But over the 18 hours or so that we were together, he probably talked about World of Tanks for about 2 hours straight.  He is so funny.  But I love that he loves to tell me about it, and that's what really matters.  On Saturday morning he came with me to the fabric store to get some fabric for his Halloween costume.  He wants to be King Tut.  I ordered a headpiece off Amazon, but we're sewing the rest of it.  He was extremely excited to help sew it himself, and did a great job Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening sewing all the long straight seams by himself.

2.  Brigham and I went to the symphony on Saturday night.  Couldn't get Mosey to go with us, which was too bad since it was a great concert.  But Brigham is a good date.  :-)  It was also ACL last weekend (Austin City Limits music festival), so downtown was a zoo, and the Long Center parking lot was completely filled up.  We got the last handicapped parking space up on the very top floor of the garage, and consequently spent AN HOUR sitting in a long line waiting to get out of the garage.  Seriously.  Then another 45 minutes getting through the downtown traffic and finally home.  We listened to an entire CD of Harry Potter book 3.  Thank goodness for Jim Dale and JK Rowling.

3.  It was just a musical weekend for Brigham and me.  Sunday afternoon was his Halloween violin recital.  He and I played a duet-- In the Hall of the Mountain King from the Peer Gynt Suite.  It was a really fun piece, and actually required a bit of practice on my part.  Brigham was worried I wouldn't be ready, but I was.  :-)  I thought the recital started at 2:00, so we left church an hour early, hoping to get there in time to run through it once before the recital started.  Well, it started at 1:00.  Oops.  We sneaked in the back, got our violins out, and were ready in time to be the very last performers of the recital.  I'm so glad we got there in time!  I would have felt so, so, so horrible to have missed it!  Anyway, it was fun and we played pretty well for 2 weeks of practice (well, really 2 days of practice for me), and absolutely zero prep time before the performance.  :-)

4.  A sign was posted at the empty lot up the street (our "forest") notifying of a hearing to rezone the property.  This is very bad news.  We're trying to learn more, but the phone number on the sign doesn't work-- it forwards you to another number that only has an answering machine which no one ever returns.  Ugh.  There is a big push to stop the rezoning of a bunch of empty lots around the golf course, too, which were supposed to remain green spaces for the community, but which now the country club wants to sell to developers.  It looks like their protest is going to work, which is great.  I'm not sure we have as much standing to protest, but we'll see.  It makes me sick to think of that beautiful land being plowed under for "garden homes" or apartments.  It would be horrible for traffic, and awful for the feel of our wonderful quiet little neighborhood.  Maybe we can find some endangered animal that lives there?  :-)  Anyway, on Sunday night we went to a neighborhood gathering to sign a petition against the rezoning of the golf course lots, and picked the brain of the lady who is spearheading that effort.  She gave us some good information.  I wish I had more time to devote to that.

a few things.

1.  Brigham has been loving the bunsen burner I got for our chemistry class this year.  Yesterday he spent an hour or so distilling water.  Today he asked if he could boil down his spit in a test tube to see what was left.  Eww.  I said no.  Should I have said yes?  Maybe I'll let him do it tomorrow.

2.  Luna is a little hunter.  Yesterday she caught a lizard outside, brought it inside to show all of us, and proceeded to eat it up with all of us as her audience.  And the night before she brought in a mouse she had caught and was going crazy playing with it.  It was actually super-cute if you could look past the gruesome dead-mouse bit.  At least it wasn't bloody.  Ben took it outside, but she immediately retrieved it and brought it in again.  She was having such a good time that Ben decided to let her play with it a while longer.  Well, she disappeared with it, and now it is MIA.  I don't *think* she ate it, which means that unless she was courteous to bring it back outside, we have a dead mouse somewhere inside the house.  Double ewww.

3.  World of Tanks...  Sigh... How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.  Joseph and Mosey are obsessed.  They love to talk to (at) me about the game and all the different tanks they have and the pros and cons of each one, and battle strategy and how many more experience points they need to get to the next tier, and should they spend their gold to buy a new tank or to get an upgrade on one they currently have, and on and on and on.  Seriously, those two could talk for HOURS about World of Tanks, barely stopping to take a breath.  It will come up at the most random times.  I'll be doing a quadratic equation with Joseph and he'll be looking studiously at his paper, presumably concentrating on algebra, and he'll suddenly start elaborating on some World of Tanks intricacy and I'll have to reel him back in to the real world of math homework.  :-)  Tonight as I was taking Mosey home from cello lessons, I congratulated him on moving up to Suzuki book 4.  Enthusiastically he responded, "Yeah, I know, it's just like World of Tanks..." and he was off, talking nonstop all the way home..  I never did figure out exactly what the Suzuki tie-in was.  :-)

10/07/2013

All in all a pretty good Monday.  Not nearly enough sleep.  I thought I was in good shape with my lesson, and I was, but I decided at the last minute to give the kids all a copy of the scripture mastery mnemonics that I have been making.  Well, I needed to finish 2 of them on the computer in order to fill up the page (I put 6 on a page) and not waste my card stock, and doing that and then formatting all of the other ones to fit on the page and then printing them out took FOREVER.  I ended up getting to bed well after midnight which meant about 4 1/2 hours of sleep which is just not enough.
But I made it through the day.  The boys were pretty good although I did have to mention 2 or 3 times during the day that if they would simply put HALF the amount of effort into finding ways to be kind and helpful that they expend in finding ways to be annoying to each other, our home would be a far different place.  :-)  Seriously, it's like they plot at night, brainstorming weird things they can do to annoy each other.  Patting each other on the head (hard) every time they pass.  Making high-pitched squealing sounds from the far corners of the house and then claiming it wasn't them.  Sitting as close as possible without actually touching the other person, but invading personal space nonetheless.  Making faces across the table.  The list goes on.  Oh well, as long as they aren't hurting each other I guess I should be grateful.  :-)
Mosey and Joseph have been getting more and more involved in World of Tanks, an online computer game.  Ugh.  All last weekend it was a battle with those two over computer time.  I have such mixed feelings, though, because Joseph has started a "clan" (meaning he formed the group and is in charge of it), which is kind of cool, actually, a way for him to practice leadership skills, and the description he wrote about the clan is really good.  It reads like an adult wrote it, and he says that any bad language will get members kicked off the clan (they can "chat" with each other during battles).  He organizes battles and works on recruiting people to his clan.  It shows quite a bit of initiative on his part, and I know he feels responsible for his clan.  They can only fight battles when they're all online at the same time, and as group leader he feels like he can't skip scheduled battles.  I'm proud of him for doing all of this, and it's great for him to feel responsibility toward other people, but still it's a COMPUTER GAME and not real life.  It's not real-life leadership and social interaction with other people (including his family), and on the good-better-best scale of how he could be spending his time, I'm not sure it ranks that highly compared with other things he could be doing...  Sigh...
OK, I've got to get our science lesson ready, so that's it for now.

October 7 family letter

Hi family,

Aarrgh.  I missed Eva's p-day!  Oh well, she'll get this next week.

Conference weekend is over...  Conference weekend always feels like a little break from reality-- a mini vacation right when I need it.  I loved Elder Holland's talk, Elder Uchtdorf's talk, and Elder Soares talks the most, although there were lots of memorable talks.  

During conference we put up Halloween decorations.  Brigham informed me that our old decorations were not adequate.  :-)  Too much cutesy, not enough creepy.  Which is fair since all of our decorations have come from when the boys were really little.  So he did a bunch of internet/pinterest searching and came up with some good ideas for our yard and house.  I'll take pictures when it's all finished, but it's looking good!  Between sessions we went to Target, Walmart, Hobby Lobby, Halloween Spirit (a great big store that just went up in a shopping plaza nearby-- I can't imagine they'll be open all year, but we'll see), and the dollar store.  Should have gone to the dollar store first. :-)

This last week was good.  No early seminary, so no 30 minutes between classes, hence no blog posts (I'm writing now during my 30 minutes between the 5:40 class and the 7:00 class), and now I can't really remember what happened.  Oh, well.  On Friday the boys had an airsoft battle with 5 other boys.  Ben came home early and joined in.  :-)  Airsoft has been really great for my boys' social lives.  We have a standing airsoft game every Friday afternoon which the boys look forward to all week long.

On Tuesday we went to Seaworld!  Seaworld has certain days in October open only to school groups.  Thursday was actually a designated homeschool day, which would have been so fun, but it was sold out.  We went with my friend/visiting teaching companion and her 4 kids.  We drove together down to San Antonio, which was not so fun for my boys since we were squeezing 9 people in my 8-passenger van, including 4 booster/car seats.  My boys were good sports.  On the way home, after having been screamed at and poked/pinched by the kids next to him (including his brother!), poor Mosey unbuckled and sat on the floor for the rest of the way home.  

Anyway, the trip to Seaworld was just OK.  Most things were not open, and there was a lot of stopping to go to the bathroom, to get snacks, and general dawdling that we didn't get to see as much as we could have.  But we did get to pet dolphins and that was pretty cool.  At least it only cost $4 per person (plus a tank of gas, but I'm not going to count that :-)).

The rest of the week was full of regular school stuff and practicing and orchestra.  Mosey is 3rd chair cello, which is extremely respectable, but I know he was disappointed.  He really wanted to be first chair.  There will be additional chair testing later in the year, though, so he has more chances.

The weather is starting to turn a little bit.  We still had a couple of days in the 90's last week, but only 80's in sight this week.  A cool front blew in on Saturday evening and it was actually the first time in months and months that I felt a little... cold? outside!  What is that sensation??  Yesterday evening we went on a walk/jog/bike ride around the old golf course and it was just perfect.  The grass was perfectly green from the rain we got last week, the deer were just coming out (Ben and the boys and Sandy tried to orchestrate a joint attack on the deer, surrounding them from all sides, but they were too fast), and it was one of those idyllic evenings that I want to remember forever.

So I better close now since my 7:00 class will be here any second.  I love you all!  Have a great week!