Happy Halloween!

We have had a lot of fun celebrating Halloween this month. Syracuse city holds an annual pumpkin walk and it is amazing! There are thousands of pumpkins! Lots of them were pretty spectacular too. 

Paul and I got to go to a fun Halloween party with some of our friends in our ward. I dressed up as a mad scientist and Paul let me paint his face like Frankenstien. It was so fun! We played a game with these mouth pieces that was hilarious. You and to pick a phrase (something like "please have fun with the pumpkins") and your team had to guess what you were saying. So funny! 

 We had a fun ward harvest party. Susie competed in the donut eating race with her bff Kensely. She lives next door and they play almost every day. 

Susie also had a fun costume parade on Halloween at school. This is her teacher, Mrs. LeFevre, dressed up as a witch! I almost didn't recognize her! Can you spot Susie? She was pretty shy walking around the gym. I got to help with her classroom party afterwards.

We carved few of our pumpkins. Here is Susie being silly:

Trick or treating in our very own neighborhood so was much fun! All of the kids we know and love were out and about. The kids looked so cute in their costumes! We had so much fun collecting candy. Daddy went home with Clark after a little while to pass out candy and put baby to bed. Susie, Braden, and I continued trick or treating. They got to stay up till *gasp* 8:30. When it was time to get ready for bed they were all pretty tired and cranky due the full day of fun. I loved Halloween this year though! 

This month Paul got to complete a Tough Mudder with his brother. He flew to Texas and raced with a team of guys that work with Michael. He had so much fun. Not as much fun as I had seeing the pictures of the race! These ones of him running through the live wires had my sides aching!! Liesel and I ran the Harvest Halloween Half in Syracuse, too. She is fast so I only kept up with her for the first 6 miles or so but I still got my best time! 2:17 :) 

Fall, Conference, and Birthday Fun

We love the Fall! We've been working on our Fall bucket list. We went to the canyon in Ogden to see the fall leaves, but they were still green. They are probably beautiful now so we need to go back before it gets to late. We've had fun buying pumpkins and trying on our costumes. 

We went to Black Island Farms with my brother, also known as Uncle Kenzie. Susie loves to hang out with him, they get along pretty great. Black Island Farms has some fun activities for kids and we had a blast! Mackenzie carried Clark in the carrier the whole time, it was so nice!

I always see great ideas online about ways to involve the kids with conference and make it memorable so I finally did one this time! Each apostle has his own bag with a treat, snack or activity in it. Some of the things we did we already had like prophet matching but we had some new activities like coloring ties and conference bingo. The kids had a fun time trying to match up the speaker with his picture on the bag. I had to finally give them Elder Hales, because he is so much younger in his picture, they didn't recognize him. His talks are always my favorite. We all enjoyed conference, even Clarky listened ;)

Dad had a birthday. The big 3-0. The kids and I tried to plan 30 surprises for him to celebrate. Some of them were pretty low-key! Others were a lot of fun. My favorite surprise was having his family come for dinner and cheesecake on his birthday. I asked each of them to write down a memory for him to read and they sent me some great memories. I think it was Paul's favorite gift. His brother Michael sent a lot, I might have teared up a little reading them, of course Paul didn't have this problem! His brother Jonathon even sent me about 30 pictures of Paul when he was little that Paul had never seen before. We printed them off and hung them up. I'm so grateful for all of Paul's family! Here is Susie helping me make rolls for birthday dinner. She loves to help in the kitchen! 

Here are a few of the pictures Jon sent. I think this first one looks so much like Braden! Wow!

Another one of his birthday surprises was a hiking trip to Zions. We really wanted to hike the Narrows from the top down (it's a 17 mile hike, almost exclusively in the water), but alas we didn't get drawn for the permit. So we hiked Angels Landing and up the Narrows a few miles. It was gorgeous and a really nice chance to spend time together. Olivia and my mom babysat for us. 

This is a ton of pictures! I should probably journal on here more often and put more details of funny things the kids do and say.. aye. Trying!!