Halloween FHE - Sugar Cookies

Decorating sugar cookies for Halloween for an FHE activity with our BFFs - definitely something to do again next year :)

Aurora and I did a practice round before FHE and decorated some Hello, Kitty cookies we made with the cookie cutter

and decorating kit from Nanny.

Ready to decorate!

 "Kitty cookie"

 Dad got home just it time and helped Aurora eat it.  Mmm!

 Excited to get started with our decorating

 But the kids had to beat Darwin with their plates first :)

 Rori getting some decorating help from Dad

 Mr. P putting his sprinkles on very carefully, one-by-one.

 Aurora taking her sprinkles off very carefully, one-by-one :)

 Mr. P so proud of his cookie.  What a cute kid!

 There was much concentration going on in our little kitchen.

 Love this picture of R!

 (I'm taking the liberty of not posting pictures of my cookies.  They were sad to look at, but delicious to eat!)

Dar's bat cookie

 Jared and his tiny pumpkin cookie :)

 Miss R decorated 3 cookies, and very well done too!

 I just like Rori's confused face in this one

 Tracee gets the prize for best decorated cookies of the night for sure!  Hers were 100% better than mine.  No joke.

 

 All three kids in a sugar-cookie-coma on the coffee table at the end of the night.

Thanks again for decorating cookies with us, McSweeney's!  We love you guys, but you already knew that :)

P.S.  Thanks so much for all of your frosting suggestions.  I actually ended up using store-bought frosting this time anyway (lame, I know), but I might get brave enough to try one of your suggestions for when we do Christmas cookies!

Oh yeah!  And watch for more Halloween festivity posts to come.  I just need to do a little picture exchange with Tracee first.

The process

It honestly was fun to make our own costumes this year.  This is definitely the most effort I have ever put into a costume in my life and it's actually pretty satisfying.  Not that it's something I want to do every year, but it was fun this time.  I found the idea on Pinterest a year ago and saved the link (I don't have an account on Facebook or Pinterest--hence why I couldn't just pin it--blogging is my only mode of social networking :) ) in case I ever had the chance to use it.

The gal whose tutorial I followed said she did the costumes last minute.  I have no idea how it was a last-minute-throw-together-costume, because it took Dar and I about 10+ hours to do ours (all of Friday evening after Dar got home from work and through 2:00ish Saturday afternoon).  You have to allow time for the paint to dry a bit between coats, and we had to do about 5 coats of paint on our pants and Dar's shirt, just because of the fabric.  We ran out of paint after using 2 full bottles (we ended up using 2.5 bottles) and it took extra time to drive 40+ minutes round-trip and two stores to get more.  Joann's (a fabric store) did not have the right kind of fabric paint.  Are you kidding me?!  Thanks to Hobby Lobby for coming to the rescue!  We're happy about how the final product turned out though.  I thought I wanted to be really gung-ho about it and outline everything with glow-in-the-dark fabric paint, but by the time we got all our bones the right shade of white I was ready to be done :)

I have to add that I'm pretty proud of myself that I did my shirt all by myself.  For not having a crafty/creative bone in my body I thought the stenciling, the cutting, etc. I did on my own turned out pretty good!  Dar did help me with the placement though, to make sure I ironed my ribs and the baby in the right places.  Anyway, that's probably way more info than anyone cares to read about, but there you have it!

 Final product, without baby girl's bow sewn onto her head.

 Dar's shirt completed.  Woot! Woot!

And just for kicks and memorabilia purposes, I thought I'd post our costumes from Halloween's past.  Enjoy!

2006

1920s murder mystery theme

 2007

Mad Scientist and his lab assistant

 2008

Witch and Phantom of the Opera

(we obviously didn't have a theme that year) 

2009

Jack Sparrow and my lame attempt at trying to be his Black Pearl :}

2010

 Mad Scientist again and his freaky mom/baby creation

2011

Bee Keeper, Queen Bee and Baby Bee

2012

Skeleton family :)

Happy News!!

We made our own Halloween costumes this year :)

(Except for Aurora's - we bought hers)

But the best news of all:
We're very happily expecting another baby girl March 28th!

Credit for our costume idea goes here.

Thank you, Nanny & Omie!

Dear Nanny & Omie,

I love the adorable mummy you made for me.  It makes a great necklace and looks better on me than on the wall. :) Thanks for the mummy and the Hello, Kitty cookie making kit.  Mom will help me make some later and we'll think of  you every time we take a bite.

Love,
Aurora

A little help, please?

As many of you know, we have a toddler with several allergies at our house.  Aurora is allergic to dairy, eggs, and most especially peanuts.  The peanuts, even though it's the scariest allergy she has, we can definitely handle.  The dairy allergy is by far the most annoying, especially because Dar and I love our dairy products and dairy is in almost everything!!  It's still hard for me to adjust recipes for her sometimes without having to make something completely different for her to eat, but I'm learning and getting better with it.

We want to decorate sugar cookies for Halloween this weekend, if we get around to it with our crazy schedule, and I found this delicious sugar cookie recipe I want to try.  Luckily Aurora does fine with dairy and eggs when it's baked into stuff, so we don't have to completely avoid those ingredients.

Here's my problem: I want to make homemade frosting to go with our homemade sugar cookies (and one that tastes good too), but being an extreme amateur in that arena I have no idea how to make a non-dairy frosting that works well for decorating sugar cookies.  I'm sure some of you are laughing at me, but I really haven't made many homemade frostings in my lifetime and I'm not really sure where to start :)  I did a quick browse on the internet this morning and I didn't find anything that really appealed to me.

Your suggestions and recipes are gladly welcome!!  You're welcome to leave it as a comment or send me an email if you have my email address.  Thanks for your help!

Canning Maniac

I wouldn't say canning season is my absolute favorite, but I certainly do enjoy consuming the harvest of our labors throughout the year, so canning our produce is definitely worth it in the end (except for spaghetti sauce--I won't do that again like last year).  I really didn't do a whole lot of canning this year (about as much as I usually do, I guess) but a friend in our ward called me a "canning maniac" last week while we were exercising together.  Thanks, Cassie ;)

Just for my gee-whiz and being able to compare for next year, here's what I canned this year (approximately).

24 quarts of tomatoes

24 pints of salsa (two different kinds)

12 pints of peach jam

12 pints of grape jelly

48 quarts of grape juice (we picked 7 5-lb buckets full of grapes!)

And while we're on the topic of harvest time, Aurora helped us pick grapes and she helped Dar harvest all of the pumpkins from the garden too.  She's such a great helper!

 

 

 Picking out a Rori-sized pumpkin

 

 

 When we're out in the garden her face always shows evidence that she's been snitching the tomatoes.  I think she eats the green ones more than the red ones though.  Silly girl.

 Helping Dad with the pumpkins :)

Getting ready to help Mom pick some grapes

but checking out the grasshopper Dad was showing her first

The lovely grape vine

 This is the first year we've picked so many grapes for canning

 Homemade grape juice is DELISH!!  It seriously can't be beat in my book.

 

Happy canning season!  Until next year . . .

A Family Event

I'm on a committee at UVU for an annual conference each November, and I LOVE being a part of the committee every year.  In the past we've done a conference on adoption (which has been wonderful and inspiring every single time) although this is the only one I posted about on the blog.  This year, however, we decided to focus our efforts with a broader perspective and attempt to reach more families.  So, this year we're hosting the UVU Conference on Family Life, and it's going to be great!  I'm really excited for it.

The conference will be on Friday, November 16th from 9:00am-4:00pm in the Sorensen Student Center on UVU campus.  The keynote presenter is Matt Townsend, a communication and relationship expert; and concurrent presentations will be held throughout the day discussing a broad and varied range of topics surrounding Family Life.  One of the sessions will be presented by my very own cousins who I love dearly.  Some of you may know them.  They'll be talking about the challenges of raising a child with disabilities.

We'll also have food! :)  Lunch will be provided to all participants, and the food is always delish!, from my own personal experience.

Aurora and I would love to see some of you there (she'll be my side-kick, as always)!  Our committee has put a lot of effort into planning this wonderful event, and it's one that will benefit everyone who is a member of a family :)  Check out the website, and you can also register early for the conference on the website too.

Hope to see you there!!

Hee Haw Farms

Our mortgage lender (who is awesome, by the way) reserves Hee Haw Farms in PG one evening every October for all their clients, so we get to go for free.  It is something we look forward to, and especially this year since we actually had a kidlet of our own to follow around (we didn't go last year but we did go the year before when I was expecting Aurora).  Everything just seems way more exciting when you have a kid to enjoy it with you :)  And Aurora really did enjoy it.  Dar and I laughed a little bit though because she was acting way more timid than usual.  I think all the new, exciting stuff was a bit much for her to soak in all at once and she was almost on system-overload trying to take everything in; but she did warm up after a bit and had a good time.

She LOVED petting the bunny

 There's a cool little petting zoo with lots of animals.  You get to go right in with them and pet as many as you want.  Aurora was a little scared but Daddy was a huge help and made her feel a bit more confident.

 I told her before we went that she'd probably see a piggy, and she was so excited there were two baby piggy's!

 Petting the pig with Daddy, but keeping a safe distance :)

 They had a couple HUGE piggy's too.  This one apparently likes to eat pumpkins.

 We had to stand at the fence and watch the huge piggy's for a bit.  I love this picture of her :)

 Going down the huge slide on a burlap sack with Daddy.

 She really did enjoy it, even if her face doesn't show it.

 

 I tried to convince her to sit on the tractor all by herself for a picture, but she wouldn't do it.

 She saw the "choo-choo" right when we got there, but when we finally got the chance to ride it, she was not too happy about it . . .

 . . . she cried!  She really did like it after we started moving, I promise.

 We found a tractor that was more her size, but she just wanted to go play in the corn pit :)

 I know there's probably way more of these corn pit pictures than necessary, but at least I know Nanny will enjoy them :)

At first she stayed really close to the edge, playing with the corn gently.

 Then she started to get into it

 Next step, she sat down in it

 We got her to lay down in it, and she threw corn on herself :)

 See?  She did like it, and she did have some fun! :)

 Daddy tried burying her in the corn.

 Ready to get up

 I love her concentration in these next few shots so I had to post them too

 

 

 

 

 Our traditional family shot in the cornstalk teepee

 They had a horse tire swing just like Grandma and Grandpa!  She was totally chillaxin' and not even hanging on.

 We got to pick out a free pumpkin (well, free for us).  Although this is not the one she picked.

 And she wouldn't sit still on the pumpkin pile long enough for us to get a cute picture.  Maybe when we pick the pumpkins from our garden. . .

We already put our Halloween decorations up almost 2 weeks ago, and going to Hee Haw Farms made me even more excited for autumn and Halloween: my favorite time of year!  I love awesome FHE activities like this--we should definitely get out more. :)