Scooby-Dooby-Doo

Another year, another halloween. I considered skipping the whole costume thing this year, and just use something that we already had available. Maddie and Jayd were just fine with that, they are a little beyond the "family theme". But I told Allie and Gabe that we could be Scooby Doo and company this year before I calculated that Halloween would be on a Sunday. I thought maybe they would forget, but oh no, this time they remembered. So here are our Scooby Doo costumes that we enjoyed wearing to the ward Halloween party. As always, it was fun to dress up and be someone else for the evening. Gabe is Scooby Doo, Allie is Daphne, I am Velma, and Jeff is Shaggy. You would be surprised how many times we were asked where Fred was! We should have adopted someone else for the evening.

Fright Fest

We went to Magic Mountain on Friday night for FRIGHT FEST. I took my kids and a few friends. They had decorated the park with lots and lots of spider webs. There were pumpkins on all of the lampposts. Many of the lights were turned off, making it quite dark throughout the park. They had turned off the lights on the roller coasters as well. I didn't think that it would make that much of a difference, but it really did. It felt different to be rushing through the cool fall air in the dark. In some areas, there were fog machines and ghouls wandering about. Allie and Gabe didn't like the ghouls (we accidentally wandered into that area, then fiercely avoided all other scare zones). At one point we walked all the way around the park the long way to avoid a scare zone! They also had special shows. We went to see the hypnotist show. It was really amazing. They did very silly things on the stage and despite our intial reservations, we laughed the whole way through!

Refer: 10202010

So I am having way too much fun with the date lately, probably my love of numbers and their symmetry. Today is 10-20-2010, the palindrome day. It is the same backwards and forwards, in a sense. So I looked up palindromes (words that are spelled the same backwards and forwards) on the internet and found several fun words, and even a few phrases. Here are some of my favorites:

evitative
kayak
level
madam
racecar
radar
redder
reviver
solos
stats
sexes
testset

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.
Desserts, I stressed!
Evil did I dwell; lewd I did live.
Live not on evil.
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Yo, banana boy!
No lemon, no melon.
Dammit, I'm mad!

Oh, Where did my Son Go?

Jayd came to me Monday and said "I want a hair cut." It was getting a little longish even for him, so I made an appointment. He cut it all off!! It has been very strange. I am happy that he now has shorter hair, I didn't really like the long hair, but decided it wasn't a battle I wanted to fight. But now that he has short hair, we are all having difficulty recognizing him! I didn't realize how much we relied on the long hair hanging out of his baseball cap to find him. We could not find him on the baseball field yesterday for anything. We would be cheering "Good play second base!", and then look at each other and say "Is that Jayd?"

The Perfect 10

Today is October 10, 2010, or in other nomenclature 10-10-10. Being the very silly mom that I am, I decided we needed to celebrate the only day that will be a perfect 10 for the next 100 years. So I arranged for 10 activities to do during the day to celebrate 10. Here is what we did:

We had to take a picture at 10:10 in the morning of 10-10-10.







I hid 10 bags with 10 gummi bears in each bag around the house. I tried to hide them in places that the kids would find them as they went through their daily activities.








We read ten scriptures that were from chapter 10 verse 10. I was a little worried that we would have a very strange scriptures, but they turned out to be quite profound and meaningful.









I gave them each 10 dimes. Gabe thought it should have been 10 dollars, but that would have been ten 100 cents, not ten 10 cents.






We made 10 plates with 10 cookies each to take to 10 of our friends. Due to Allie's cake the day before, we even had 10 different colors of frosting to decorate them with. The hardest part about this activity was limiting the number of friends to 10!








We found 10 words that had 10 letters in them. Our words were cafetorium, brainstorm, permission, profession, sferrazzas, scheduling, priesthood, testaments, television, and confounded.









We made 10's out of breadsticks. I had originally planned to make pancakes, but that plan was scratched when I remembered that it was fast Sunday.





We each played ten notes on our instruments. It is very convenient that we happen to have 5 instruments so that we could create a truly awful noise. Gabe played the trombone, Allie played the flute, Jayd was on the french horn, Maddie was on the clarinet and I was on the piano.



We each wrote down 10 things we would like to do during our lifetimes. Gabe is going to be a renaissance man, he wrote down 9 professions and "jump off airplane". Maddie wanted to "somehow convince mom to take me to the store to buy something for the dance next week." Allie wanted to "inherit the idea of 10-10-10" and "help Mom with everything" (I really liked that last one). Jayd wants to own a car lot, he wrote down 4 cars that he wants to own, including a high tech RV.
Our last activity lasted throughout the day, we took 10 pictures! We needed one more picture, so we took a picture of our 10 hands! We really enjoyed celebrating our perfect day of 10's. By the end of the day, Allie and Gabe were already planning activities for 11-11-11 and 12-12-12!

Albus Who??

Allie and Gabe came to me today with gummi bears stuck to their chins and said "Look Mom, we are Albus Dumblebear!"

Box Canyon steps out of the Box

For years we have been driving through Box Canyon to get to the Rocketdyne Pool. It is a little shorter and doesn't have too much traffic if it is near to rush hour. It is a windy two lane road, that is a little scary in a few places. There are many houses along the road, some of the very unique and unusual. The kids enjoyed seeing the landmarks as we passed along the road. With the closure of the pool, we will not be driving through the canyon nearly as often. So we took a few pictures to remind us of the funny things we counted on seeing every time we drove through. They include a flying pig with red eyes, an Indian carved into the rock, a metal gate that says "Box Canyon, and a pink elephant with star shaped eyes.