Happy Halloween!

We had a wonderful time at Grandma and Grandpa's Halloween party - Max, Ruby, and Buddy even dressed up this year! It was fun to celebrate Halloween with our little cousins, Jack and Elie. They were so adorable! We then went trick-or-treating with our friends back in our neighborhood. McKenzie trick-or-treated with 5 of her friends, so she didn't join in on the family fun this year - we missed having her with us!

Birthday Fun :)

The girls and I celebrated McKenzie's friend Rachel's, birthday this weekend. Our original plan was to go to their beach house, but we decided to change plans after hearing about the storm that was supposed to hit the coast. Winds up to 65 miles were predicted along with inches of rain. McKenzie and her friend are pretty afraid of storms, so her mom and I decided that being with two freaked out girls for the night may be a miserable way to spend a birthday. Instead they got a room at the Embassy Suites for the night, and we had a great time. We went to Red Robin for dinner, went shopping at the mall, and swam until 11:00 at night. The kids loved playing around the hotel, working out in the fitness room, riding the elevator, and playing hide and go seek. I think they were happy to see us leave :)

A New Cookie

It's been a long time since I've baked a new cookie recipe. Tonight I decided to try one from a baking blog that I had read recently. They looked and sounded delicious, so I thought I'd give them a try. The cookies are called Rolo Stuffed Chocolate Chip cookies, and they are delicious!! They are a little bit time consuming (you have to freeze the Rolos for at least 2 hours, unwrap all of them, and then put them inside the ball of cookie dough, freeze them for 20 minutes, and then finally bake them)! Kelsey was a great help, like always. I added pecans to some of them, as the recipe compares them to turtle chocolates (which is one of my favorite candies at See's :). They're definitely worth the effort!

16 Years!

Peter and I celebrated our 16 year anniversary on Friday! I really cannot believe that we have been married for that long - it amazes me how fast time goes by. I am so fortunate to be married to such a great person. Peter is such a faithful, devoted husband who always encourages and believes in me. I know it's a big job to put up with all my faults, but he has done an amazing job :) Of course we celebrated by eating, one of our very favorite things to do! We had plans to go out to dinner on Friday night, but the kids' schedules changed at the last minute so we had to wait until this morning to go out together. We decided to go out for brunch at Mother's Restaurant in downtown Portland. We left the house before the kids were awake - it's so great to have kids who are old enough to stay home by themselves! Peter and I had such a good time together, just spending time talking and hanging out. The food was delicious, and we bought enough to make it last all day! After eating our meal, we ordered a cinnamon roll and piece of carrot cake to go. We shared the cinnamon roll around lunch time and then ate the carrot cake after dinner. Since the cinnamon roll had nuts and raisins in it, and the carrot cake had carrots in it, we didn't have to share with the kids :)

Get Out and Serve Day

Today was Westside Christian's Get Out and Serve Day where the entire school spends time volunteering for 30 different agencies throughout the area. Families are encouraged to participate, so Peter and I joined in. A few weeks ago the different agencies all came to Westside to share about their programs, and then the students got to choose their top 3 locations where they wanted to volunteer. Conner's first choice was to serve at the Portland Rescue Mission which serves men who live on the streets. When I heard that this was the agency that we would be serving at, I was feeling a bit nervous. I used to feel very comfortable being around homeless people, but I had become fearful. Well....today was an amazing experience. We spent the first hour learning about the Portland Rescue Mission, how it refers to all of the people who enter their buildings as "guests." The people who work at the mission love these guests like you wouldn't believe. They help meet their basic needs, help them with drug and alcohol addiction recovery, give them a place to take a shower, use the bathroom (very simple things that we completely take for granted). They taught us that the main cause of homelessness is broken relationships which I had never really considered. Conner had a great time with his friends while painting a stairway of the shelter. When he left he said that the experience really changed his perspective of people who are homeless, and he said that he couldn't wait until the next service project. Thanks to everyone who sponsored him for this service project - he met his funraising goal thanks to you, learned a ton, and had a great time serving.

Annoyance Turned into a Smile

I sometimes (actually, most of the time) feel annoyed when the kids leave their things laying around the house and don't bother to pick things up. Last night after the kids went to bed I was picking up and found Kelsey's dry-erase board, markers, and eraser laying on the floor downstairs. Feeling slightly irritated, I picked them up but then took a second to read the note on the board. The little message McKenzie wrote to Kelsey made me smile. McKenzie loves to write notes - she writes messages on the shower door and wrote a note in my calendar that I found one day when I was at work. She expresses herself best through writing and always has. This time I was happy that Kelsey left her board downstairs because it gave me a chance to read a sweet note and appreciate the things I love about the kids, rather than focusing on the things that can irritate me :)

A couple mixups

When Peter and I enjoy a beer together, I like the beer to be really, really cold. Peter has been putting the beer in the freezer for me, and he always remembers to take them out in time. Well, I thought I would do the same thing the other day when we had company over to watch the Duck game. Unfortunately, I forgot my beer was in the freezer until Peter found it the next morning. Luckily the bottle didn't break, but beer leaked out into the ice cube tray. Beer ice cubes might actually taste pretty good. Tonight Conner was working on a project for one of his classes. He thought he was using a glue stick to glue down his pictures. Then Kelsey said, "Conner, why are you using my lip balm to glue your pictures?" Oops!

Conner the Baker

Conner made a delicious assortment of peanut butter cookies today. He made peanut putter, peanut butter chocolate chip, and peanut butter cookies with Hershey kisses. He really does have a talent for baking. I was on clean up crew and enjoyed being on the receiving end of eating cookies someone else just baked! We had our friends over to watch the Duck game, so they were excited to eat his freshly-baked cookies. I'm hoping he'll soon learn how to make a few dinners so that he can cook for us on the weekends.

A Little Visitor

I haven't been feeling well for the past 6 days, so I have been doing the minimum to get by and haven't been taking many pictures. The best I could do for a post today is a picture of our most recent visitor. McKenzie and Kelsey threw a peanut butter cracker out in the backyard, hoping to feed the birds, but ended up feeding something else.

The girls and I have a 3-day weekend, and Conner has a 4-day weekend. Peter only gets a 2-day weekend, but that's actually a good thing since he's working :) The kids have a couple sleepovers planned, three soccer games, babysitting for their cousins, the Westview football game, and Conner is going to have lunch with Grandma today. I love how the first thing he chooses to do on a day off from school is to e-mail his Grandma and see if she is free to have lunch with him. Spending time with her is always such a treat :)

Unexpected Surprise

Our union at work has been negotiating medical benefits - it has been very confusing, as they decided to go to tiered benefits with pooling. I went to a meeting about it several weeks ago, and my mind was spinning when I left. I barely learned what these words meant and just hoped that we wouldn't be paying too much when it was all said and done. It looked like we would be paying up to $400 every month rather than $200 every month like we did last year. Paying an extra $200 each month was going to be challenging given our new expenses for school. This past Thursday my paycheck was deposited into our account, and we noticed that they did not take out any money for medical expenses. We guessed that they didn't yet have the total amount that each employee would be paying, so Peter and I figured that they would take out double the amount for next paycheck. Then I got an e-mail from our union yesterday saying we don't have to pay anything at all for medical expenses! This was completely unexpected and quite a big surprise for us. It's pretty cool how things like that happen, especially as Peter is just about to finish up his job at Halton. I think someone is watching over us.... :)