Standing alone

William's favorite thing to do now is to get up on his own and stand on his own. He does it constantly. I keep expecting him to just start walking. Today, he discovered that he could climb up the kitchen stepstool. I've never had a 10 month old this mobile. I guess it's because he wants to catch up to his big brother and sisters.

Coloring Cousins...

I asked Kaitlyn if she wanted to draw a picture of her new cousin Joshua to send to him. After she started drawing Joshua, she enjoyed drawing so much that she continued to draw one of Alexander, and Robby-all new cousins born within the last year. She even wrote their "names" on each paper-note the zig zag line across the top of each paper. In order the cousins are Joshua on the left, Alexander in the middle below, and Robby on the right.

Halloween cookies

Every October we like to make and decorate Halloween cookies. Several years ago my mom sent us some really nice autumn cookie cutters, so we like to make sure we use them. Instead of sugar cookies, I decided to make Gingerbread cookies this year. I can never get any sugar cookie recipe to taste right, but I do like the Gingerbread recipe I recently found on allrecipes.com. I also like to frost them with glossy "royal icing".

Here's the link to the recipe for both the cookies and the icing:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Classic-Gingerbread-Cutouts/Detail.aspx

What is it?

Our neighbor brought this over for us. I haven't a clue what it is. She says it's a type of melon that's very expensive at the grocery store-like $6 each. She didn't know what it was called though. It's very prickly. Should we eat it? Any help from our southern friends who might know what this is?

What babies dream of...

Here's another super cute picture of our new baby cousin Joshua. His mommy says he likes to sleep with his hands close to his face. I think we figured out why, he's dreaming of playing football with his Daddy. (For those of you who don't know, my brother is an avid sports fan)

Sock Hop

We had a ward party last night. It was a 50's Sock Hop. It was really well attended. I made some poodle skirts for the girls out of felt and I dressed Alan in jeans and a white t-shirt and slicked back his hair 50's style. It was a lot of fun. They had burgers and fries, and rootbeer floats. They played 50's music the whole time and even did the Limbo. And even the missionaries got into it, as you can see.

I tried to take some video of the dancing, but it was too dark in the gym. So I took a lot of pictures.

Here's Kaitlyn and her friends Titan and Myah. She and Titan were running around holding

hands practically the whole night. It was very cute. At the end of the dance they had set up a "drive-in" theater and we all went out into the back parking lot and watched "Lady and the Tramp". (I know the rest of the world is actually having cool fall weather. We are too, but cool weather for us is 60's, so it's no big deal to be outside)