My little brother received his mission call last night. He'll be going to the North Carolina Raleigh Mission, reporting to the MTC in November 2010! We're so excited. It was fun to have everyone in the family make guesses about where he would go and post it on a world map. We were there with him just a few weeks ago and hoped he would get his call while we were there. We missed it by a week and a half. We're grateful for modern technology. We were able to be there via webcam. Such a fun experience.


I'm so proud of him. He'll be a great missionary and it will be a wonderful two years of his life!

This is my family (my family, sisters families, brother and parents) right after my brother was ordained as an Elder (received the Melchizedek priesthood) , this summer.

Valentine's Day Cards 2010

I found this idea on this site. We had fun making them and giving them out to friends and family this year for Valentine's Day. (We actually have some packages ready to go out to long distance family. They've been sitting in the packages for a week, on my counter. Why is it so hard for me to get to the post office???)

_____________________________________________

And we finished our Valentine's heart garland last week. My daughter actually did most of the sewing herself. I didn't even know she was doing so well. I left her doing it all by herself. When I came back to check on her, she was almost done. This picture doesn't show the colors very well, but you get the idea. It was fun to have it up for the lovely little holiday.

Busy Halloween Week

Three of my kids, with three of their cousins.

It's been a week since my last post, but it seems like weeks! We've been so busy that I feel like there should have been multiple blog posts from each day last week. There just never seemed to be any time to blog about things. Now, I guess I'll try to fit it all in at once and only share a few of the more interesting things that we did.

My baby chick. I need to send this to Little Birdie Secrets. I got the idea from them.

I stayed up so late one night making/altering this Draco Malfoy costume.

Preschool Halloween Party:

7-year-old birthday party on Halloween Day:

We did crafts and snacks. I think they had fun. :-)

6 and 7-year-old's use a lot of mod podge!

This pic is of the mummy pizzas before they went into the oven.

And... Our dinner and dessert last night:

We made these Stuffed Pizza Rolls from The Best Bites blog. (see my last blog post about them.) We used our own homemade pizza dough recipe (I should have my husband post that here on my blog sometime...) This was SOOO yummy! A bit more work (just took a bit more time to assemble) but WELL worth it! Really, dipped in warm sauce, it's so much better than pizza! You've got to try it! We'd like to try this one next time.


And here is my family's first ever Pizookie! We all just grabbed spoons and ate it straight out of the pan together! And of course we LOVED it! (We don't usually have dessert after dinner - in fact it's really quite rare here.) We DO usually make cookies on Sunday evening, though, and last night we decided to bake it a little differently! Thanks to some awesome friends for introducing me to these yummy creations! (I live in a cave, apparently!)

New Mexico for Fall Break

Here's what we were up to last week. In random order. I may try to go back and add captions sometime. ...and I may not. :-) We had a blast in New Mexico! Sometime soon I need to post all about my friend and all that I learned from her last week, just by being there in her home and observing her as a mother. But, that's for another day...