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!



School Stuff

Last week Lilly's preschool had an apple party and it was so cute!  They did cute things like bobbing for apples,

apple tasting (they got to dip apples in caramel sauce, chocolate sauce, marshmallows, sprinkles, mini choc chips and cinnamon sugar. They also got to taste applesauce and apple juice) 

and apple painting where they got to paint a wooden block that looked like an apple. It was such a cute party!  I love her preschool teachers!

Also last week I went to Sophia's parent conference.  It was good and it sounds like things are going well at her new school.  These were hanging on the wall outside her classroom. It was kind of funny because most of the kids had drawn their face or a stick figure of their body or something and so it cracked me up to see that Sophia had drawn a full on scene with her in it.  I love that girl!

How to make Apple Cider and Cute Dresses

This weekend we went to my parents house for the annual apple cider making day!  Before we went we made sure to put on our Halloween shirts and snap a cute picture.  It took a few tries but I think we finally got it right.

I finally told her to not growl at me and that did the trick! (don't mind that the picture is taken in front of our car).

Once we got to grandpa's house we started gathering the apples.  We shook the trees first to get all the apples and then gathered them into buckets.

 Lots and lots of buckets! 

Then we put them in a water bath to clean them off 

and then put them in the grinder and watched grandpa use his big and strong muscles to grind the apples.

Then we placed all the apple pulp in the press, turned the handle

and out came the juice!

 We made sure to feed the leftover apple stuff to the cows which they thoroughly enjoyed.

We also took a break to play with the uncle Jason's dogs.

Everyone was still working hard after a few hours.  It was a project but thank goodness many hands make light work.

 Some of us got a little sleepy though and needed a rest on the couch.

 After all our hard work it was fun to see how much cider we made.  About 30 gallons worth!

After a fun day of cider making Doug took the girls home so that I could go to the RS broadcast with my mom.  They made a cute Halloween craft together

 as well as some fun Halloween cookies.  I love the giant ghost one on the left.

My mom and I had also gone to dollhouse festival earlier that day and picked up some fun new dressed for the girls.  Sophia loved hers and was pretty sure it was a real princess dress.  She was also pretty sure she looked like Belle.

 Here's Lilly in her cute dress

and a sad Mabel in hers.  The minute I saw this dress I totally fell in love with it and thought she looked pretty cute in it.

It even looked super cute from the back.

Overall it was a fun and busy weekend and made us happy it's fall!