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Private Selection Holiday Gathering

For Thanksgiving I will be sharing my Private Selection products with friends and family in the form of appetizers. I love to start out a good meal with appetizers as it helps cyrb the hunger pains as you start to smell the main dish cooking. This year we will have Private Selection gourmet cheese and crackers with Kalamata Olives. I cannot wait to see what everyone thinks of "store brand". :-)

Pumpkin Carving

The boys spent the night at Nana's on Saturday so that mom and dad could go to a Poker Game with friends. For something to do Nana let the kids pick out pumpkins at the local Walmart. Jeremy helped carve the pumpkins and even roasted some seeds. The next night we took the Jack-o-Lanterns home and placed the lights inside. Bryce had the Pumpkin headed man on a horse and Kyle had the Boo Ghost.

Geocaching

To kick off the "Walk Across Arizona" we joined in on a Geocaching event. During the next 8 weeks all 4 of us will be recording our "steps" and watching as our steps add up to walk the 410 miles across Arizona. The boys were super excited to do their first Geocache event. If you are unfamiliar with what Geocaching is it is like a modern day treasure hunt. The goal is to find a Cache with a Handheld GPS unit and then remove an item from the box. Typically you replace an item with something else but since this was a special event it was just the fun in finding all the treasure boxes and finding what is inside. The 1st box was a bit hard to find but once we did the boys we ubber excited. It was a HOT day but we found all 8 boxes and we had walked over 4000 steps in about 2 hrs.

The boys are HOOKED. We are now looking into Caches near our home and will be looking for Caches when we go off-roading.

Crazy Hair Day

Today was Crazy Hair Day at school and since I was an organizer of the event and co-president of the PTO I figured I would get in on some of the fun. Last night I did some internet searches for ideas to do for crazy hair day and found a great tip for keeping a lot of hair sticking straight up on my head. Since I wanted to do something with some Dum Dums I bought at the store I thought of a DuM Dum Sucker Tree. So I placed a water bottle on top of my head and rubber banded my hair to the top of the bottle. IT WORKED. So Mark drilled some holes in the bottle so I could stick the sucker sticks in the bottle. This morning I placed the bottle in my hair then sprayed it pink, hunted for holes to stick the suckers in and then sprayed it again with a glitter spray.

EVERYONE loved my hair. Tons of kids asked for suckers! I really did have a great day and even wore it that night to Halloween Bunco.

Sept 11th Field of Flags

We headed down to Tempe this evening to see the field of flags that were displayed for the individuals who lost their lives on Sept 11th. Each flag had a description of the where the person lost their life and a short bio about them. Mom and Jeremy went with us and we all walked thru the flags reading the bios and reflecting on their lives. At 7pm there was some key speakers and music along with a candlelight vigil. It was a sad but also a great learning experience for the kids.

Micro Burst hits Home

When we got home from our day trip the kids and I went outside to let the dogs in the house and to survey the storm damage. In the dark the first thing we noticed was hmmmm no trampoline and all the patio furniture is blown around and laying on the ground. While Mark was still putting away the Rhino I continued walking around the yard to see what else was wrong or damaged. Bryce told me that the tree was leaning against the house so I wandered over to take a look and found some things on the ground that looked like wood. Turns out they were roof tiles. So I ran to get Mark. We did the best we could in the dark to assess the damage then we went inside to make sure there was no water damage due to the missing tiles. Mark used the Rhino to finish uprooting the tree so that it would not do damage to the house should we have another storm. There really was no saving it anyway. I was sooooo sad :(
In the morning I got up and took pictures for us and for the insurance claim if we end up filing one. Then we took the Rhino out behind the house to find the Trampoline so we can bring it home and take it apart.