Friends Old & New

It was a terrific day-100% across the board. And a full day to say the least! Em & B started off with their friend Kamryn's harvest birthday party this morning:

Then we had one of Mike's childhood friends, Mikel Poulsen & his family arriving here in town around noon! Mikel had emailed a few months back and asked if we'd like to come to dinner at their place. They live in Wenatchee & though we're close-we've never gotten together-not to mention, never met each others families or even SEEN him since high school! Long story short, we weren't able to make it the proposed weekend, so we rescheduled and invited them to a little fall/halloween dinner here in Ellensburg! Such great times-we really wished they lived closer so we could do this kind of thing more often. Mikel has an awesome family-2 sweet little munchkins, Ebbi & Nesse-and a beautiful, wonderfully personable wife, Marci. It was kind of humorous how close the personalities were between our kiddies-Ebbi is a lot like Em and Nesse has the same spunk as our Bryce!  :)

We started our afternoon by enjoying the harvest festivities at Dusty's Nursery & Pumpkin Patch. The sky was grey & it was drizzling, but those Poulsen's didn't give a hoot-I knew right away-these were MY KIND OF PEOPLE! ha ha ha.
The kids had a great time getting their faces painted, going on pony rides, petting the bunnies & goats...

 ...jumping off hay bale pyramids, sipping on cider & bee-bopping to the music.

We came back home and in between the princess dress up sessions, the kids helped make homemade noodles for Spaghetti. They LOVED it! Ebbi & Emma had 3 helpings each!

After dinner the kids went out to the porch and picked out one of our many homegrown pumpkins. Em & B gave the Poulsen kids a couple halloween friendship tokens (Mr. Pumpkin Head parts), and we decorated pumpkins together. It was great fun.

The kids jumped their jiggles out in the trampoline-rode the roller coaster backwards & played with EVERY toy imaginable in the bedrooms-they only stopped for a split second to shove in a halloween brownie bite before they hit the toys again. Good times.

I pulled out a scrapbook I had made for Mike years ago, and we found pictures of he and Mikel as kids. It was hilarious-the two guys had fun reminicing about old times. Time flew and before we knew it, they were helping us clean up to head home. We haven't had this much fun in......I can't remember. Hugs to the Poulsen's for a great afternoon. :) It was nice to finally meet Marci & the kids. I'd LOVE to spend more time with them. I just know we'd have a blast together!

Em's Preschool Field Trip

EmmaLee's class went on one of their only field trips of the year-it was to the pumpkin patch here in town. Adrienne offered to have Bryce join her kids in their Music & Movement class this morning so that it could be a special "just Emma" event.
I dropped off the boys and took Em to D&M for a mini Hot Chocky before we headed to the pumpkin patch on such an overcast day.

Dadda took off work for an hour & came to support her too. We got there and there were 60 FAMILIES WAITING AT THE GATES! Craziness...that is a lot of preschoolers. :)
Needless to say, it was a little chaotic so we didn't stay long. We are people who like quaint, intimate things more than crowds, so.....still-she had a good time.

This chicadee will be getting some serious pumpkin patch time this year-we have another trip here tomorrow for a birthday party, we are bringing out of town friends here that same afternoon, AND going to yet another patch in Yakima next week! ha ha ha. Good thing kids adore harvest time.

My Heart Belongs

to this sweet sweet puppy. I just can't get enough of his precious face!

In the Spirit

It is October 3rd and we are in the full halloween swing of things around here! I LOVE it! For dinner we came up with these super fun gems: Cheesy Pumpkin Dippers....the kids picked sugar pumpkins from Safeway for 50 cents, I hollowed them out, filled them with nacho cheese & served them with spooky blue corn chips! They LOVED it!

Then we put together our traditional 2 buckets of goodies to go "BOO" our friends. This year we gave Nutter Butter Ghost Pops & Halloween Oreo Pumpkin Pops with a container of "Witches Brew" (hot chocolate).

You can download the free printables for your own booing here:
http://tomkatstudio.blogspot.com/2009/10/youve-been-booed-free-printable-boo.html
Here is the hot chocolate label jpg:

This is what the directions say on the hot chocolate can:

Emma helped make this little token for her preschool teacher last night. Not my own idea but fun & practical all the same! Especially for a "random" teacher gift! :)

And to get our house fully ready for fall-I created a new gallery wall in our dining room, filled with pictures of the kids that I can replace with the changing seasons. I am pretty stoked about how it turned out.