Happy Halloween!!!

What a busy day!! Holy Cow!! First of all, according to my mom, the girls were still up at 11 o'clock last night. We put them down at 8, the little stinkers. Amazingly enough they were pretty good today. We started off the afternoon by taking pictures before heading out on our excursions.

Avary was a witch:

And CJ was a cat:

We started our trick-or-treating at Spencer's work. It was really fun. The girls hit the jack pot there.

While we were there, we met up with Rachel and Anthony, Spencer's cousin and her family and Rachel's sister Wendy and her daughter Arnika.

We had two witches and two cats, it was pretty funny. From left to right: Sabrina (Rachel's daughter), CJ, Avary, and Arnika (Wendy's daughter). Sabrina has a new little brother and he was there dressed up as a pirate, it was SO adorable!!

After Spencer's work, we headed on over to the Southland's Mall that I just love. That was where we went last year and had a lot of fun, so we thought we would go again. It was like being at a theme park, it was SO crowded.

It was like this up and down BOTH sides of the street, incredible. We didn't even go to all the places and it took us an hour. Here are some other cuties that we saw there: I love this picture because this little boy was dressed like a devil and he was crying and so sad, it totally fit. His little sister was an angel, very cute, but I didn't get a picture of her.


This little girl caught our attention. She was so cute and content, it was amazing.

After trick-or-treating at Southland's, we ate dinner at Rumbi Island Grill, AWESOME fish tacos, and then we came home and went trick-or-treating around our neighborhood. Our next door neighbor set his garage up for the kids to go in and get candy from a bowl. It was so dark and eerie, but awesome. As the kids went to take candy from the bowl, they didn't see him sitting behind it and he would jump up and scare the kids, it was HILARIOUS!! I loved it. He did such a good job. Most of the adults and older kids wouldn't go in either. That made it even more funny. There is a house in our neighborhood that goes ALL out for Halloween. This is a picture of it during the day:


And this is it at night (pictures don't bring it justice, it is seriously cool):

The girls cleaned up on candy this year. They kept saying that we had to do more trick-or-treating because their buckets weren't full. We had to keep emptying their buckets so they could carry them. They are just like their daddy, they love candy.

All in all it was a fun Halloween. We hope everyone had a great Halloween, we sure did.

Halloween Favorites

I thought for something fun and, well, just something, I would put a list of favorite Halloween movies on our blog. Enjoy........if you dare! HA HA HA HA HA!!

For Kids and Family:

1. Hocus Pocus
2. The Worst Witch (My absolute favorite when I was little. I had a crush on Tim Curry.)
3. Nightmare Before Christmas
4. Casper
5. The Witches


For Grown-ups:

1. The Messengers
2. The Eye
3. The Others
4. The Village (I had nightmares for about a month after watching this one, watch out.)
5. Skeleton Key

Pumpkin Painting

We decided, this year, that we were going to paint our pumpkins this year instead of carving them. Last year we did all the carving and the girls couldn't help, plus, this way we are going to bake the pumpkins after Halloween and freeze it instead of having them rot and throwing them away.


The girls had a BLAST! They painted for about 2 hours, it was great. My mom also had fun. She was the last one to finish and I think hers is the most eleborate. I am glad that everybody had fun and was able to put their own spin on it.

From the left we have: CJ, Geewah, Mommy, Daddy, and Avary.

Avary was so funny with hers. We turned it around to look at it and she saw some orange that didn't get painted and started to get really upset and said that she didn't do a good job. It was really sad, but cute. We convinced her that she did an excellent job and that it was our favorite. Both the girls are great artists, we are so proud.

While my mom was painting hers, Avary asked her what she was painting and my mom told her it was a self portrait. Avary replied and said, "OOOO! Scary!" We all laughed, it was fun.

So now, we have our house completely decorated. We are finally done with the decorations, 2 days before Halloween.

At least we got them all up. Maybe next year we will have them up longer than 2 days.

Spooky Family Fun

We FINALLY got our Gingerbread House decorated tonight. The girls really had a lot of fun doing it. They told me what to do. About half way through, I realized they were describing our house. If you look close enough, you can even see a door bell and CJ insisted on a peep hole. We had fun though.

Our Life the Past Four Weeks

Sorry it has been so long since our last post. School started for me and Spencer has been working 50 hour weeks. We hardly have time to see each other. None the less, here is a little update on our little family.

The colors have come and gone here in Colorado. This is a picture taken from our deck. The colors were so beautiful that I couldn't resist the opportunity to capture it.

It doesn't look like that anymore. The wind has come and taken it all away. We get pretty strong winds out here. Sometimes I still catch myself being a little scared.

School is going well for CJ and I. I actually strained my back and have missed some classes, of which I am extremely upset about, well, the lab classes anyway. I am actually home today instead of at school because of my back. We were making truffles in school today and I am not a happy camper having to miss it. Anyway, one day these last couple weeks, I walked into the playroom to get the girls for dinner and I came across this:

CJ had written this all by herself. I was so amazed and proud of her. Spencer and I had our first "Parent Teacher Conference", how weird that was, but her teacher mentioned that CJ doesn't write her words. I corrected her by telling this story and she was amazed and said that she would have to get CJ to break out of her shell and show her. Little stinker likes to show off at home, but not at school.

My week off school, my mom and I decided that enough was enough and stopped buying diapers.

Yep! Potty trained. She was so easy!! We had a couple accidents, but it went really fast. It is so nice not having to buy diapers anymore. She loves her panties and it is EXTREMELY rare when there is an accident.

The girls and I had some fun Sunday morning with breakfast. We had waffles and afterward, had a little fun.

CJ got hers to stick all by herself. When I finally got Avary's to stick, the stupid thing wouldn't come off. I mentioned that she has the Schumann nose remembering when Spencer and I did this right after we were married with his Grandpa, his stuck on for about 10 minutes no joke, and my mom about came unglued. The girls really thought it was fun though. This morning I caught CJ trying to stick her fork on her nose, didn't work.

We have F.H.E. on Sunday evenings because Mondays are so hectic with school and late night working, so for a treat we had what the girls call, "Worm Cake". They helped me make it. They love to help in the kitchen.


They loved it!! They had so much fun "digging" for the worms. My mom gagged and couldn't eat the worms, but enjoyed the "mud". It was really fun and YUMMY!!

Hired

I was hired for my first decorating job this week. Personally Yours...Cakes & Confections has officially been born. It was quite the learning experience. Thanks to my mom and Spencer, I was able to finish the project at 4:00 am the day it was getting picked up.

A lady was doing a baby shower for her daughter because it is going to be her daughter's last baby. She wanted 24 cupcakes and she knew EXACTLY what she wanted, bassinets with babies asleep in them sucking on a pacifier. In discussing what flavor of cupcake she wanted, she decided to go with an orange cupcake with a chocolate something in the middle for the guests to enjoy. I thought and thought of what that could be, I could do chocolate pastry cream, but then they would have to be refrigerated. I had decided on putting a chocolate kiss in the middle while they baked. When I asked the pastry chef at school, he had mentioned making ganache balls and freezing them. I liked that idea, so I made orange truffles to put in the middle. When I baked the cupcakes, I discovered that the truffles had melted too fast and had sunk to the bottom of the cupcake. This wasn't good. My mom and I had an idea to hollow a little cake out of the middle of the cupcakes and put a truffle in the middle. That worked. I sealed them with some icing and called it good.

Now, the bottom of the cupcakes were covered in chocolate. It looked SO simple in the picture and sounded simple, but the chocolate was not going on smooth. Not to mention, she wanted the bassinet and the hood in blue. So I melted blue chocolate and white chocolate together, but it didn't turn baby blue. It turned baby green. I finally had the idea to put the chocolate covered cupcakes in a warm muffin pan to smooth them out. That worked. The hoods of the bassinet's weren't cooperating either. My mom ended up doing them twice and staying up until about 2:00am that morning finishing the bassinet hoods. Everything after the chocolate went really well, just time consuming.

Here is a picture of the final cupcake with one of my business cards:
I did four different designs on the sides of the cupcakes. She said that I could do whatever I wanted, so I did:


In the long run, I really enjoyed making these cakes. I haven't heard from her personally, but from my friend that delivered them to her and was there at the shower. She thought they were really cute and seemed pleased about them, except the color, but my friend said that she accepted that and was very happy.

I know now how to work with the chocolate, I had the idea after everything was done to put the chocolate in the muffin pan and place the cupcake in the pan instead of pouring it over like they had instructed. I would REALLY like to see someone get it as smooth as they showed in the picture using this chocolate.