Halloween!!

I love Halloween for the fact that the festivities are so fun. I love decorating and dressing up but I especially love the CANDY!! Here are some of the things we did this year to celebrate Halloween.

First, we had to carve our pumpkin.

Emily loved playing in the pumpkin guts. She threw the guts and seeds all over the counter and kitchen. She was so messy!

She even tried to eat some of the pumpkin pieces. She immediately spit them out when she realized it tasted nasty. It was way funny.

Here is our finished product. Scary, huh!

Our ward had a Trunk or Treat party at the church for the kids in our ward and neighborhood. Here is Emily ready to had our treats at our "trunk." The Young Women in our ward also put on a fund raising "Spook"egetti dinner for the ward. The charged $5 a plate and also had a bake sale of their homemade Halloween goodies. The dinner was really good and I think they raised a lot of money for their activities during the year. The Young Men put together a Spook Alley also. Russell is the Deacon's Quorum advisor so he had to help with that. He had the kids stick their hands in worms (spaghetti noodles), and brains (pumpkin). They even had one boy's head under a box so he scared the kids when they looked under the box. There was also a room with a fish pond, and a donut on a string game. It was a really fun ward activity.

Emily is definitely dressed and ready for Halloween!

Isn't she so cute! Emily has her treat bag ready to go Trick-or-Treating at Grandma and Grandpa Farnsworth's house.

"Trick-or-Treat!" There 's Grandpa Farnsworth giving Emily a treat.

Happy Halloween! Boy do I look happy in this picture (not). Any way Russell looks good and Emily is happy because she is eating a Dum-Dum sucker. She had the sucker in her hand when we got in the car because she screamed when we took it away then when we got out of the car, she had it in her mouth eating it! She had figured out how to open it all by herself!

Trick-or-Treating at Grandma and Grandpa Morwood's house. Emily got scared when Jared answered the door dressed as a vampire.

Look at all of the goods the cousins brought home! I speak all of the Reese's!

I also love Halloween for all of the fun things you can bake! I made these Itsy Bitsy Spiderweb cupcakes. They turned out really good and they were sooooo delicious!! I took them to work on Friday and everyone loved them.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Becca's Wedding

On October 23 our friend Becca Romberger got married in the St. George Temple. Russell and I had the opportunity to attend the sealing and it was amazing! I love going to the temple and escaping the world for a few minutes. This time was especially good, however. The sealer not only gave the couple getting married great advice but also the people in attendance. While he was talking, I started tearing up because I could feel the spirit so strong. I realized once again how important a temple marriage is. I also realized that I had been taking my marriage and also my husband for granted and I needed to appreciate them better. Russell and I are sealed for time and all eternity and our children are also sealed to us because they are born in the covenant. We made a covenant before God to love and care for each other forever. That alone has gotten us through some hard times. While watching this sealing, I was taken back to when we got married in that same room. I remembered the feeling I had there. I knew then, as I do now, that our marriage was ordained of God and that a higher power was present witnessing that sacred ordinance. I know Russell and I made the right choice to be married in the temple and I am so grateful we were worthy to enter that sacred place to perform this sacred ordinance. We have been, and will be, eternally blessed for it.

Becca and her new husband Jake outside the temple after the wedding. Everyone was so happy especially the bride and groom!

After the wedding and pictures, Russell and I decided to take a few pictures of us around the temple grounds. This is the front of the temple. Emily was too interested in the fountain to look at the camera.

I love this picture! I love how the sun glistens off of the pure white temple making it shine. But mostly I love the fact that our family will be together forever through the ordinances performed in this great temple. The church is true!!!

It Must Be Bath Time...

The other morning, I was just playing around on the computer while Emily was finishing her breakfast. The next thing I know, I looked up and saw this...

Emily was starting to take off her pajamas! She had already worked her arm out of her sleeve and was now trying to get the other one out. I guess that was her way of saying it was time for a bath! What a cutie!

Pomegranates Everywhere!

Our pomegranate tree produced a lot of fruit this year. So we had a good time picking pomegranates and making jelly.

You can't tell from this picture but even though we had picked a box and 5 or 6 bags full of pomegranates, there were still a lot on our tree. Thank goodness we had this picker so we could get the ones that were on the top branches of the tree. Emily liked helping also.

But mostly she liked eating the pomegranate seeds. She walked over to the box of pomegranates and started picking at the cracked ones and eating the seeds. Her whole face and hands were stained red from the juice. She also liked playing in the dirt near the box. Her shoes were full of sand and needles to say I had to give her a bath afterward. She definitely had fun.

Here are just some of the pomegranates we picked. We had a whole lot of them. We gave about 6 or 7 dozen away and still had plenty left over.

This is Russell juicing the pomegranates. We got three gallons of juice before we ran out of jugs to put the juice in. After juicing them and staining our clothes and hands red, we started making jelly! It was actually pretty easy. We just followed the recipe on the Pectin box and got busy cooking. We made 6 batches of jelly and still had 1 1/2 gallons of juice leftover!

As you can see, we made a lot of jelly! We made about 40 jars of jelly. The jars were various sizes but most of them were 8 oz. jars. The jelly turned out sooooooo yummy! You might be asking yourself what we are going to do with 40 jars of pomegranate jelly. Well if you are our neighbor or friend, you now know what you are getting for Christmas! I am trying to come up with a cute saying to go along with the jelly so if you have any ideas please comment on this post and let me know.

The next morning, we used a gallon of the pomegranate juice to make syrup. We found a recipe on the Internet that looked good so we used it. The syrup is kind of tart but still really good.

We still have about 5 dozen pomegranates that I don't know what to do with. I'm thinking of making more jelly so they don't go to waste but if anyone has any good pomegranate recipes please let me know.

Halloween Party!

Every year my mom puts on a Halloween Party for all of her grand kids. It is really fun because we all come dressed up in our Halloween costumes, we play games, and then have a Halloween themed dinner.

I had to bring a salad or treat to the dinner so I made this "Graveyard Treat" layered jello salad. I think it turned out pretty cute and it was really good too.

We found this way cute Pumpkin costume at Wal-Mart for $14 so we decided that was what Emily was going to be for Halloween. As you can see she is adorable in it. It was really funny to watch her walk in it because the fluffy pumpkin body shook back and forth as she waddled around.

Here are the Morwood cousins. Chelsie's clown costume was awesome. I especially liked to huge shoes and the squeaky nose! Jason was the dreaded Darth Vader and Referee Cassie kept everything under control. Braden was the heroic Indiana Jones.

Ooooh! The scary Pryor's. Jared and Jacob were werewolves and the most scary costume of all was Josh the Gorilla! Tyrel loves Josh but not in his Gorilla suit. He was terrified of that costume. Then Klint (Tyrel's dad) made him pet it and that definitely did not go over well with Tyrel. Then Russell decided to let the Gorilla hold Emily and she screamed. So Josh won the most scary costume award according to me. To bad Jessica had to work. We missed you Ca.

Here's the Bassett's. Terral was one tough biker chick while her girls Cambree and Chrislyn were fairies, Drew was scary Count Dracula, and Justin was the fearless hunter.

And finally the Hughes'. Tyrel was a cow, Taylor a pretty ballerina, and Jacee was a funny clown wearing her dad's big shoes. Baby Tyler was such a cute little horsey, that costume was darling. Becca was a swinging Poodle Skirt girl.

Emily loved playing with all of her cousins. This was her favorite game, the bean bag toss. She carried the balls everywhere and didn't like it when someone took them away from her.

The kids liked playing the candy bar game.

The cake walk was fun too even though Emily and I got out first.

Emily liked the cake we got after the cake walk. She didn't even want to decorate the cupcake she just ate it!

Of course you have to have bobbing for apples at a Halloween party! Russell had to help Emily.

We also played ring toss around the pumpkin. Chelsie had to help some of the boys that couldn't ring it. It was funny.

Finally, the whipped cream and bubble gum game. In this game you could not use your hands and you had to find the gum and then be the first to blow a bubble. Little did we know that the bubble gum had been in my mom's gum ball machine for so long that it was rock hard. The kids practically had to break their teeth to chew it. We all laughed at them.

After the games we had a dinner of mummy dogs, Sloppy Joe's, deviled eggs that looked like eyeballs, and other Halloween treats. We even had a smoking Calderon of homemade Root Beer that was way good. We had a great time at the party. But we were all sick from eating too much candy! Aaah, the joys of Halloween!

How Do You Like Them Apples?

Russell's grandparents have an apple orchard up in New Harmony and this year they grew a ton of apples. Russell and I took home two full boxes so we could make applesauce and also dry some for apple chips.

This is just one of the boxes of apples. Little did we know, applesauce takes FOREVER to make. First, we had to cut and core all of apples. Then we boiled them in this huge pot.

After boiling the apples, the hard part began...the mashing. Because we didn't want chunky applesauce, we used a colander to mash the apples. If we do make more applesauce, we will just use a blender and make chunky applesauce because the using the colander to mash took so long.

This pot was full of apples and you would think that would make a lot of applesauce but after we finished mashing the apples, we only filled a pot a third of this size with apple pulp. That in turn produced 6.5 pint jars of applesauce.

The applesauce turned out really good but it just seemed like a lot of work for not many jars. Oh well the apples were free.

We dried the second box of apples to make apple chips. They turned out good too.

I have been learning a lot about home canning lately. It is kind of fun to make your own food storage!