Time to FLY

Went to a pumpkin patch with the Girl Scouts.  We went through two small corn mazes and then picked out pumpkins.  We ran a little long on time, so it was frustrating to have to race to get back into town in time for one girl's soccer practice (we were late), but getting this many kids organized and herded into cars was very difficult.  We had a talk with them about getting going faster for the next field trip.  

Ben loved posing in this cardboard cut out of a truck.  He made me take pictures of him from each pumpkin and window on this thing.  Each cut out had a different goofy face, but this was my favorite!  He's so sweet!

We got home from the pumpkin patch with three pumpkins--I offered one to Emma to carve and she said, "No, thanks."  Well, I couldn't just leave the pumpkin uncarved, but I needed to get dinner underway, so I suggested to Bekah that she carve it, and maybe she could carve Rex Velvet into it. She looked online and found a picture of his logo, and she set to work carving it.  It looks pretty cool!  She then cleaned three pumpkins worth of seeds, which I soaked and roasted the next day.  I'm thinking maybe next year I can plant some pumpkins--I love the idea of gardening and landscaping, but I don't really care for it.  Maybe I should have married a gardener...

I made a few cakes for the Halloween carnival.  These cupcakes were heavily frosted to make a cupcake cake.  I made one for the cake decorating contest, but somehow it ended up being donated to the cake walk instead.  Either they donated ALL the non-winning cakes, or someone put it on the wrong table.  In the end, it didn't really matter--apparently a few 7th grade boys won it on the cake walk and devoured it.  At least it was well appreciated!

This one was the Graveyard cake.  I wanted to make some cool-looking headstones, but had trouble finding cookies that were the right shape and size.  I got some cheap Mother something...you know those cookies that come in bags with the animal shapes but they're covered in that awful frosting and sprinkles?  Same brand, but they're chocolate fudge cookies.  Like Oreos, but rectangular and with fudge in the middle.  They're not bad.  I opened them up, scraped the fudge out and stuck them in the cake.  I wish I had had a fine-hole type of cake decorating tool so I could carefully write RIP and dates on the headstones, but I didn't...I just used frosting and a toothpick.  It didn't work that well, so I won't try that again.  Maybe I'll try a ziplock with a pin-hole poked in it.  

Pumpkin patch cake--chocolate & chocolate.  This frosting was originally vanilla cream cheese frosting, but I needed brown...I didn't have any brown food coloring--amazingly enough since everyone has some of that, right?  I thought about going to the store to get more, but figured I could just add some chocolate syrup to make this the flavor & color I needed.  I poured a bunch of syrup in there, and it was just vaguely tan.  Almost a grey-tan.  Gross looking, really.  Then I got out the Dutch cocoa and started dumping that in.  I got it all over the place and eventually, it got brown...and thick.  Added a few tablespoons of milk to loosen it up again.  What a pain.  It still tasted good.  Probably would have been easier to just go to the store.  Ah well.

I also made a set of cupcakes and decorated 12 of them with white frosting, M&Ms and chocolate jimmies, and the other 12 with white frosting and candy pumpkins.

At 6:00, we headed over to the school for the carnival.  Each classroom had games set up in them, which are easy enough for the little kids to play, and tickets are earned for winning games.  Those tickets can be redeemed for prizes in the prize room.  Ben had already picked out the prizes he wanted, so when he won enough tickets for those two things, he was done playing games and wanted to spend the rest of the time playing in the inflatable bouncy houses.  

Ben standing in line for the carnival games, practicing his winking.  He was frustrating when I was trying to get him ready to go--he didn't want to wear the coat that it took me more than an hour of shopping and five stores to find.  It's a little big, which was a problem I figured he'd grow into, but he wasn't convinced that it was the right fabric/cut/style/etc.  He was delighted that I found him a button-up shirt for his ensemble, and that several people recognized who he was.  

Although we dropped her off with her friend after school, Emma came to the carnival for a little while.  She wasn't wearing her big, fancy get-up, but elected to wear the more comfortable outfit that we assembled last year.  She said she didn't want to wear something so fussy and didn't want to wear the big wig and risk messing it up, so she packed the simpler costume.  Her friend decided to wear a pretty dress and the big blue wig.  They ran into their friend, Bryce, and hung out with him while they waited for Miss E's mom to finish volunteering in one of the classrooms.  Today they planned on going to the anime convention and will meet up with Emma's new friend, Miss S.  I haven't met this new friend, but I met her other friend, another Miss E, who has a prosthetic left arm.  Sometimes she wears her Hook hand, and sometimes she wears the "Creepy Mannequin Hand."  She seems like a very funny kid and they two girls have a great time together at school.

I made a costume from an old sweatshirt from a second hand store and some black fabric I had lying around.  I made a collar and created a Ringleader jacket.  I also bought a white button up shirt and a top hat, and I wore my black pants and made a ribbon bow tie from scrap fabric.  I think I spent about $10 on the entire outfit.  I didn't win the adult costume contest (again), but I got lots of compliments at the carnival.  That was great!  It turned out the prize for the contest was a whopping $5 gift card.  Woo.  

I am frustrated still with the level of cleanliness in the house.  It seems no matter how much cleaning I do, it gets trashed in a matter of hours and no amount of bribing, cajoling, punishing, manipulating, threatening, scheduling or pleasantly asking can get anyone to help me out around the house, so for a long time, I just gave up.  I clean for three or four hours, breaking my back getting it tidy, and I go to the store and return to the front room torn apart, books and coats dropped wherever they happen to land, and debris littered everywhere.  I have to create a better battle plan.  Not sure how well it'll work, but I'm going to try the FLY lady plan for a while.  The first couple of days, you just have to make sure the kitchen sink is clean.  I can do that.  However, on that first day, I went into Ben's room and boxed up over 200 books that he no longer needs (a dozen or so came from Cammie's room, too).  I posted a note on my FB page and found a home for them all with my friend, Elizabeth.  She has a toddler so she could take all the young kids books away and promised to find a home for anything she couldn't use.  EXCELLENT!  Three boxes of junk we don't need!

This week's "cleaning zone" is the master bedroom, so I did a little bit of tidying in there.  I emptied the recycle bin, pushed the drawer back under the cabinet (it broke off the track some time ago, so it just lays on the floor under the cabinet and we slide it out when we need something), and organized Kelly's dresser drawers a little.  There are a bunch of mysterious things in the bedroom that aren't mine, they're not being used but I don't know what to do with them, and they're too valuable to throw away.  One of them is some kind of pedal system for a flight simulator game.  I saw something similar on eBay that is listed for $150.  I don't like to list things on eBay, though.  Maybe we could put it on Craigslist. My next goal in there is to put away all the summer clothes in the closet and pull out all the warmer winter clothes.

I may not be perfectly successful with the FLY lady thing, but it's worth getting something started.  It suggested putting post it notes everywhere reminding me what I'm doing and positive affirmation stuff, but I don't like the idea of having post it notes everywhere, which to me looks like more clutter.  Modification is key, I think.  I'm also supposed to come up with a mantra or something I can say to myself while I clean, meditate, or while I'm sitting in the car.  She had just said, "I love you" to herself.  I've tried thinking of something that is a message of positive affirmation without sounding really corny, but I haven't come up with anything yet.

I'll take suggestions.