October for ya!

I once again have a lot of pictures to post and we'll start out with the family pictures that we took a few weeks ago. I thank my friend Becki for just taking a few pictures of the family after church. It was a bit chilly, so we only took a few shots not far down the road from our house. We had taken a family pic down there about 4 years ago and I really liked the look of the big old trees in the background. I'm not a huge fan of the stress of trying to find a photographer and look perfect blah blah, so I thought we would try to make something out of whatever pictures we could take in a few minutes time.

I'll first show the final product that I completely love!

Next, I'll show a bit how we got there.

So here is a test picture I took of Dallin when I was trying to figure out where to take the picture:

Well for some reason, even though this looked awesome, I decided to take the pictures on the other side of the tree like this:

I thought the trees in the background would be more behind us in the picture and look cool, but it didn't quite end up the way I wanted it to. SO... I LOVE Photoshop, because I was able to take this picture of the family and paste it into the picture of Dallin in front of the tree. If you look closer, you may see that Owen has a different face too (I took it from another picture we took there) Some say I may be cheating, but hey- you do what you can when you have little kids that don't always pose for pictures very well :) I will definitely say that I am super pleased with the final product that didn't cost me one penny- plus it didn't really take that long to do a few Photoshop fixups.

 

Next up: I'll show our Halloween photos.

Halloween can always be a bit tricky to schedule since its my Mom's Birthday also. We decided to do a bit of Trick-or-Treating, go to the Trunk-or-Treat, do more Trick-or-Treating, and then end up at my Mom's house. It was a fun night for the kids. This was my first experience with Trunk-or-Treating, and let's just say it's probably my last. I actually think its rather ridiculous to do it where we live. We live in a wonderful safe neighborhood where we know pretty much every person that lives here. Its silly to go to the school for 15 minutes and pass out a huge bucket of gross candy (because no one wants to spend a ton of money for something that lasts 10 minutes) and then leave and come back and do regular Trick-or-Treating. That's usually what everyone does. It might be cool if it lasted longer than 10 minutes. But everyone is in such a rush to be done so they can go regular Trick-or-Treating. So what's the point? Maybe it would be neater too, if I even knew half of the people there. But I didn't (since our family is so young and we're not that involved in too many school activities yet). I definitely understand Trunk-or-Treating for people that don't have a great place to go Trick-or-Treating, but we do, so we definitely don't need it.

Anyway... I'm done with  my Trunk-or-Treating rant, but here are some great pictures of the kids in their costumes!

First: Cute little Owen in his pumpkin onesie! I have a picture of Dallin in this same little onesie. Its so nice that my little guys were born at the same time of year so all of the clothes fit! :)

Here are Dallin and Hailee getting ready for Trick-or-Treating!

We had to get Owen in there somehow too- so I had to sit in on the picture.

I haven't carved a pumpkin in years- so I finally decided this year to make time to at least carve one pumpkin. We are blessed because Kyle's parents always give us a lot of nice pumpkins from their garden. So Dallin picked out his pumpkin, and I carved it while the kids watched. It was funny, because they were both gagging when I started taking out the seeds and pumpkin guts. Maybe next year they'll want a "stab" at it. haha

 Here's Hailee from the day before Halloween trying on the adorable little monkey costume. She kept changing her mind every day what she wanted to be for Halloween; from a bee, to a princess to a penguin. Although we had her bee costume that still fit her from last year, I'm glad she ended up deciding on the monkey. This was Dallin's favorite when he was two and three, because he wore it for two years in a row :)

Our Halloween getup for the front porch with all of the awesome pumpkins from the Wrights!

Now after Trick-or-Treating. They were beat, but sure did love how Mommy was totally fine with them pigging out on their candy (for a few minutes anyway :) I love how Hailee is holding her sucker in this picture. Too cute!

Finally ending up all together at Nana's for the evening.

Okay-I'm just going to throw this in there too- my funny little Dallin came up with this scary monster face himself. It really is pretty gross! haha!

Moving on to the next exciting thing of the month: Our nice snow storm! We woke last Thursday to about 4 or 5 inches of snow! It was a bit of a shocker.. but the kids loved it! They played outside in the snow all afternoon- and the next day too! Its a good thing, because it was all gone by Sunday, and back up to the upper 60s for Halloween on Tuesday. I just hope we have a good Winter this year and get a lot more snow than we did last year. (which was hardly any)

And here's a picture of the kids playing outside in their costumes just a few days later. You never would have guessed that we had so much snow only a few days before.

Here are some pics of our little Owen. He's growing so fast- and smiling all the time. He's such a good baby!

 Here he is after a bath. He loves his bath and never cries. He's just so sweet!

 Here's a picture of him after church. I really wanted to take this picture of him in this outfit, because its really fun to take pictures of my little guy in the same outfits I took pictures of Dallin in. I even sat him in the same place for his picture.

Here's Dallin's school picture. We didn't order any, (like I said, I don't like paying for pictures if I can avoid it), but they sent home a tiny little picture on a card (mostly to entice us to buy I'm sure) oh- and its pretty tempting- cuz this is a way cute picture! I might just have to fork out the $12 for one 8x10

Here's a picture of Dallin and his winnings from selling the most raffle tickets out of his class for the school carnival. Well honestly, I did most of the work because when everyone came for Owen's blessing, I asked if they wanted to buy any. So I made Dallin share his goodies with me :)

 Finally- here's Dallin playing in the bubble bath. That kid LOVES water. He was seriously in the bathtub for almost two hours playing. He was really enjoying himself. Honestly, I was enjoying my time too :) We'll have to do that more often!
I walked in to check on him- and he was just laying there like this. If I had a big ol' bathtub to soak in, I would probably be in that same position!