Ashy, Ashy...

Here's a little video of Mabel I meant to include in the last post.  She's doing what she does best.  Dancing around like a crazy person as she sings "Ashy, ashy" (Ring Around the Rosies).  Love that girl!
009 from jmwilkins10 on Vimeo.

Early Thaksgiving

Last Sunday we had Thanksgiving with Doug's family since his parents left on Monday to be the area auditors in Brazil for 2 years.  It was nice to see them one last time and fun to have Thanksgiving early!

 Here's Mabel snuggling with Grandpa before dinner.

Here's the crowd at dinner.  We are quite the group!  That's Lilly clear down at the other end of the table.

I can't believe I didn't get any pictures of the food but I did get a shot of this adorable cake my SIL made for her son who was celebrating his 8th birthday that day.

 Here's the girls with spooky fangs from Aunt Kimber.

and Mabes looking cute.

 Here's the girls with Grandpa and Grandma before we left.

And here's a few more Halloween pics.  Here's Lilly after preschool the other day when they talked about spiders! 

And here's the girls Halloween photos from this year.  We have a witch, the Bride of Frankenstein and a skeleton. Spooky!

Pumpkins 2012

Last night we carved our pumpkins to get ready for Halloween!  These first two are actually from a few weeks ago from when my parents were kind enough to watch our kids one night.  They carved pumpkins with Grandpa and loved it!  I love how Lilly went for a traditional pumpkin face

and Sophia went for something a little more abstract.  Totally fits her.

Here's Doug from last night planning something big for his pumpkin.

 Here's my version of a non-carved witch.

 Lilly by some she colored.

 Here's Mabel's beauty.

 Here's some white ones that the girls carved (with a little bit of help).  They picked the faces though.

The mayhem halfway through.

 The finished pumpkins!  I think they turned out pretty good.

 So spooky!

 I love how Doug's turned out.  Once again, he's amazing!

 We're ready for trick-or-treaters!

Here's a final one of Sophia's that I found this morning when we were cleaning up.  Looks like it didn't make it outside last night.

After carving we watched "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken".  It was a pretty good one! 

Sophia also took these pictures of the spooky sky last night.  She thought it was so perfect for Halloween! 



Fun with the Swedes and Cousins

Last week we were lucky enough to have one of Doug's companions and his sweet wife visit us all the way from Sweden!  It was such a fun couple of days and we wished we could have spent more time with them!  The first day they were here we went up to Salt Lake to tour the conference center (never done that before, it was awesome) and temple square.  After that we headed to city creek for a little window shopping and a delicious lunch at Cheesecake Factory.  I think the restaurant did it's job at being completely overwhelming to them.  After lunch we headed to the church history museum.  It was fun to be there because they had the annual art competition going on and it was awesome to see all of that amazing art!  The girls had fun playing in the kid are feeding the missionaries.

 Here's Mabel showing me what was for dinner.

Here's Lilly with her tower.

After that we came home and relaxed and chatted for awhile.  We fed them some yummy Gandolfo's sandwiches that night and they laughed at us for being lazy Americans and driving to church every Sunday because it so far away and hard to get to at 12:30.  It was funny and true!  We also pigged out on Doritos, Hershey's chocolate and PB M&M's (we had to show them how American's really eat) and had a good time. 

The next day we headed up to Provo to show them the temple(s) and MTC and BYU campus.  We shopped at the bookstore for a little while and then took them to DI (best place in Provo and tourist destination for sure!).  Then we went to Brick Oven for lunch (we made sure to tell them the way we'd been eating the past few days was not normal). 

(Cute random picture of Mabel)

 After lunch we went up to Bridal Veil Falls for some wading and picture taking.

 Mabel debated if she should dip her toes in or not.

Doug and the Swedes were brave enough to venture up the falls further but the kids and I were happy to watch from below.

Lilly was brave enough to get in the water but not me!  It was too cold!

After that we came home and picked up Sophia and then headed up Payson canyon to show them the Grotto.  It was pretty fun.  Jonatan is quite the photographer and was nice enough to take a family photo for us.

They were supposed to leave that night to pick up a cousin from the airport but the flight was delayed so we were lucky to have them stay another night!  Here's Doug and Jonatan (Aldste Nilsson) before they left the next morning.

 And all 4 of us (please ignore my eyes!  I promise I'd gotten plenty of sleep!)

We were sad to see them go but wished them well on the rest of their adventures in the states. 

Later that day we headed down to Wales for conference. It was fun but there were spooky things like these huge spiders!  These pictures do not do these guys justice. They're seriously huge!

Here's Sophia and Bridger with their cute puppets they made out of paper bowls down there.  They're pretty creative!

 Here's Lilly and Carson.

After we got home on Sunday we sent the girls to bed only to have them come up a few minutes later looking like this! Sophia said she was just practicing for Halloween.

 We were not totally happy but couldn't be mad at these cute faces!

Also when we got home, Sophia quickly picked us these gorgeous flowers.  I love how she decorated our table with them.  She's the best!



Spooky (and not so spooky) Stuff!

Just wanted to post some of our latest spooky creations.  Some friends invited us over the other night to decorate some pumpkins (and take a few (dozen)) home.  Here's how our girls turned out.

We also created these spooky creations (thank you dollar store).  So funny story.  I bought a set of these shapes for my girls to decorate during conference (down at Wales) and on the picture of the package it showed them fully decorated.  When we actually opened them up we discovered you have to buy the stickers separately.  Ooops and again, thank you dollar store.  When we got home from Wales we tried again with the stickers this time.

 Tonight we made this scary guy to sit on our front porch.

Good thing the girls aren't too scared.

Now onto not so scary stuff.  Here's our pumpkin and squash harvest from this year.  I think we did ok.

 A few weeks ago we went up Santaquin Canyon for FHE.  It was beautiful!

I found the world's smallest leaf

and Mabel did a great job picking some leaves.

This is kind of a random picture from when I was harvesting our pumpkins.  I found this silly guy sitting on the fence.  I guess it was too much work to grow on the ground with the rest of the pumpkins.

Here's our porch all ready for fall (this was before the addition of the dozen or so pumpkins we brought home the other night).  Happy fall!