<>Halloween!!<>

So finally here I am sitting down to recount Halloween. I got a little cold over the weekend that really slowed me down. I had to go to church anyway, of course, so by the time I got done with church I was too wasted to do anything. I feel better this morning, so time for blogging, homework, paper writing and work!
For Halloween Max was a giraffe:
Kris was a bike wreck:
(Anybody else think the costume is a little too realistic??)

I was a surgeon from the Dharma Initiative (anybody else out there watch Lost?):
Anybody who doesn't watch Lost just assumed I was a surgeon planning to put my bike wrecked hubby back together, and that worked too.

We had the ward trunk or treat at 5PM, so Kris rushed home from school and we got ready.
Those of you that know Max well probably know that he doesn't take stress and pressure too well. And by stress and pressure I mean Holiday Fun. He and I had been talking about Halloween and how it works and what happens for the last two months so he'd be ready to have fun. I think it did make a difference, but still wasn't as successful as I was hoping. I did succeed in finding out what he actually wanted to be (he decided he wanted to be a giraffe in early September) and so he actually wore the costume, which was amazing.
So anyway, he started the day off badly by waking up way way too early. Then he decided he didn't want to go to school, but wanted to "do halloween" first. So he threw a big fit on the way to school. I think school was really fun, they did a lot of halloweeny type things, and when I went to pick him up he was happy, which was good, albeit temporary.
After that we drove down to the Russell Stovers corporate offices (about 3 minutes away) where they give out bags of candy for free every year. These bags have 5 or 6 items in them, and all the items are the great big like marshmallow pumpkins and coconut cream buzzard eggs and stuff like that. Pretty great treats. So after we went home I let Max have one. (or two.) Whoops. He went totally nuts! It's funny because it's not like we keep him from eating sugar completely, but we certainly try to avoid pumping him full of sugar on a regular basis. You could really see the difference between the pre-treat Max and the post-treat Max. It was a little scary. He was running around like a cartoon fight while we were trying to get ready.
So finally we left, and of course he fell asleep in the car about two minutes before we got to the church.
Before the little nap he had been really excited about the idea of trick or treating, and couldn't wait. After we woke him up he didn't want to do anything of course. He turned really shy and didn't want to talk to anybody. He wouldn't say trick or treat, and he certainly wouldn't say thank you to anyone. Oh well.
The trunk or treat was fun. There were about ten cars or so with people giving out treats and only about 25 kids or so, so most of the kids got to make a lot of circuts and ended up with tons of loot. Bummer though, ours was the only decorated trunk. What's with that? Max barely made one trip around to everyone's cars and then he retired to the concrete thinking he was just going to get to chow down on all his candy.
That wasn't going to happen after the earlier sugar insanity. So we let him eat a sucker and we headed into the gym for some chili.
After dinner we drove out to my mom's cousins, Jeff and Cathie Biggs' house. We got to see and talk to them for a few minutes as well as their daughter Hilary and husband. They have a little girl that's about a year and half younger than Max, and Max thinks she's great.
After that we headed out to Kelly and Lechelle's house to trick or treat. Max was starting to deteriorate by that time, and so when we got into Kelly and Lechelle's he wouldn't talk to anybody or even stand still. So we left. But not before Kelly took a picture of all three of us. Yay!!
Here's Max at the end of a long exhausting day of excitement and candy:
And with the loot on the next day:
Thanks for being patient while I kept you is suspense and for sticking around for the whole long story. This Halloween was better than last as far as Max was concerned and we had lots of fun, so hopefully next year will be equally better.

>>Carving Pumpkins<<

We carved pumpkins early this year because having Halloween fall in the middle of the week is a tough one for us. Personally I think that Halloween should always be on friday or saturday night, but nobody listens to me about stuff like that, so oh well.
It pays off to have a dad that's a dentist. We use latex gloves for anything and everything!
Sultan helped out by licking us anytime we bent over to pick up stuff.

We carved all five of the pumpkins we got from the pumpkin patch and ended up with examples of several different emotions. The small ones were all commissioned by Max. He wanted one that was laughing, one that was sad and I influenced him to ask for one that was surprised. The green one is laughing, the smallish one is sad and the tiny one is supposed to be surprised, although Max thought it ended up more sad than anything. I carved the little ones.

Kris and I each carved one of the big ones.
Can anyone tell which is his and which is mine?
We had a lot of fun, and somehow none of our pumpkins ended up getting smashed!
Real halloween still to come......

**sorry**

So I made the mistake of promising I'd have pictures up and report on Halloween on thursday. Well I obviously didn't! I had some church stuff come up and some work stuff also, which has kept me from having much fun. So sorry but I'll just have to keep you in suspense a little longer.........

A Halloween retrospective for Halloween night

I hope everyone is having a great Halloween. We just got Max tucked into bed, finally and I'll give a report on how our evening went tomorrow. For now I just want to revel in past halloweeny memories. I don't have any past pictures of Kris's family on Halloween scanned right now, so this is a little limited. I'll do better next year for sure.
To start with:
Max's first Halloween in 2004. He was a bear and so adorable and happy. No complaining about the costume or the nose and whiskers (it helped that the costume was his PJs).
Max's second Halloween. He did NOT want to wear his costume and had no problem letting us know.
This picture doesn't really count because we took in at the very beginning of October. For Max's third Halloween Kathy came out and help me (like I said before, helped me means did it for me) make an awesome cape for Max. He wore it the day we finished it and never again. You would've thought we were trying to cut his fingers off or something when we tried to make him wear it on Halloween. It was a bust. Oh well.

This year.....you'll just have to wait and see how it went!

And now for a step back in time:

I'm not sure what year this was--maybe 1991. Anyway, I was so proud of this costume, and I felt so cool. I was a Vulcan from Star Trek. I went to the "beauty supply" shop in the mall and bought ear putty (or was it called nose putty?) and made pointy ears for myself and Char. I covered up my real eyebrows with concealer and powder and drew new angled ones on. And to top the whole outfit off I cross stiched a Star Trek emblem and sewed that onto my sweat shirt. Which sweat shirt I later wore regularly to middle school.
That was a cool halloween. Oh yeah, and please note the moon boots.
See, I'm usually something boring for Halloween, like here I'm a hippie. That doesn't take much. Charlotte on the other hand is always something extreme and/or cool. Here she's a crazy dragon with wings she made herself. Murphy is wearing a cape that we were dressing up in since I was tiny. How many different Halloweens has that cape seen? It was reversible, which made it extra cool.
This looks to me like 1990. I think Cammon was a pirate for about 90% of the Halloweens growing up. It's just what he was. And please notice that the shirt he's wearing in this picture is the same shirt he was wearing in 1991. It's another old dress up staple that we used all the time. What a great shirt. I wonder where it came from? Here again Charlotte is looking awesome as a crazy indian in loin cloth and light blue sweats. Mom always made us wear sweats under or with our costumes, which I finally understand now being a parent. I was a gypsy or something this time. I usually don't care what I am for Halloween as long as I'm pretty. Usually it doesn't work out and I end up less pretty than I like, but this year I think I pulled off pretty.

In conclusion, Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. I think a lot of that is thanks to my mom and dad who made it really fun--with the ghost on the front porch with the crazy voice and all the fun decorations and everything--I hope we can keep up the tradition in our house and make Halloweens as fun and magical for our kids as they were for the Randle kids.
Can't wait to hear about how your night went!

Punkin Patch

On Saturday we headed out to the pumpkin patch by our old house to get some punkins we could carve. There weren't very many big pumpkins left out in the fields, but we went out searching anyway. There were a lot of little ones lying around and Max enjoyed picking out a few for us to take home. We ended up with some great pumpkiny pumpkins. Here are some photos for everybody to enjoy if they choose to do so.
Max wasn't too keen about riding in the wheelbarrow at first, but he got used to it after a while. Kris didn't dump him out, although for a while it was touch and go.You can't really see too well in this picture, but max is holding a "beebee (baby) pumpkin" It was teeny weeny and green. There were lots of cool weird gourds there too, like the one Kris is holding. The patch was so fun looking. I love these pictures.We got a tiny one, a small one and a funny green one for Max. And here Kris is holding ours. Isn't he tough? I found one with the coolest curlicues coming out of the stem, but of course on the way home the stem broke off. Oh well, isn't that how it always goes?
Long live the pumpkin patch. It's so fun that Max is finally getting old enough to catch on to what's going on and to participate.

Pumpkin Cookies

Last year Max and I made some delicious halloween sugar cookies. I thought it would be really fun before we started, naively, but unfortunately it turned into a pretty big ordeal. You know, flour all over everything, cookie cutters spilling to the floor and getting all smushed in with sugary sprinkles and frosting and dogs running around and etc. etc.
But the cookies looked great, and tasted great even though the dog ate about half of them when we left to trick or treat.
We were looking at pictures the other day and Max saw the cookie pictures and told me that he wanted to make pumpkin cookies again. So I was brave and told him we could do it. We did it on friday and we had lots of fun! It may be our new family tradition. Max cut most of the cookies out and helped me roll out the dough. He was a great help. These cookies ended up being whole wheat sugar cookies because it turned out that's the only flour we had. Sounds weird but they ended up tasting great.
We ate them. All of them.

October is for visits

This has the potential to be a nice long post with lots of pictures, so beware!
In my family when I was growing up, my mom's parents always came to visit in the fall, and in my memory it was always in October. October was one of my favorite months anyway, but the excitement of having them come to visit always made the month really special.




Here's a picture of my mom's mom, Grandma Jackie, in the kitchen.

Here's Grandad and Murphy having a deep conversation of some kind. This is one of my all time favorite pictures of Grandad.
We really loved having them visit, it was always tons of fun.


So it seems that our little family now is continuing the tradition of October visiting. We moved out here to Kansas City in June of 2004.That following October my grandparents came to town to visit Grandad's sister. They came and had dinner at our new house. It was nice to have everyone there.
Max and his greatgrandparents!
Later that month Max and I flew out to Utah for a family visit. That was really fun. Here are a couple of pictures of that visit, just for fun. Max was soooo cute!














We also saw Kris's family, and took some fun pictures of Parker and Max together, but I couldn't get any of them to upload, so I guess we'll have to do without. Here's a picture of my parents and I at the airport just before Max and I flew home. Look how huge Max is compared to my cute little mom!
In October 2005 the Hendricks came to visit for a few days and brought Kelly with them. We had a good time taking them to some fun restaurants and playing tunes.


























The next October Kathy came to visit and helped me sew halloween costumes (ok, ok she sewed them for me) we didn't get to wear them on halloween because Max threw a big halloween fit (more details on that later), but we'll use them this year.
Here's Max the only time he let us put the costume on. Isn't it fun?
This year was the real October of many visits though. I had to fly to Utah for some work meetings and Max came with me. We had a blast visiting both my family and Kris's family. We got about two days for each family. Parker and Max had such a great time playing together. They shared and ate together and even pooped together. Well at the same time I guess. It's really fun to see them talking and relating to each other. Cousins are so much fun!
It was fun to see Cammon and Lorri since we don't see much of them, Max enjoyed that, and of course loved seeing his lovely Aunty Char and his silly Uncle Miffy.
I LOVE this picture with all the smiles!
Couldn't be sillier!
After we got back from Utah and Kris took another school trip Ken and Kathy came to visit us for the weekend (just so you know, that trip was planned long before my work trip came up, if you're wondering why everything was so close together)
We had a great weekend and got to hang out with Kelly and Lechelle a lot, which was nice, they've been so busy lately we haven't seen them a lot. We ended the visit with a big Karaoke Revolution party, which was really fun. It's Max's favorite game, so he loved it.
So we're hoping to continue the awesome October visiting tradition next year. We're a little tired this October though, and we're ready to stay home for a while. Oh and I almost for got! My Uncle Mike (my mom's brother) came into town for a business trip while Kris was gone, so Max and I got to hang out with him and we went to dinner at our favorite Mexican place. That was really fun because I haven't seen him in ages. I just don't have any pictures of us, we'll have to do better next time.
Thanks for all the visits everybody, it was so fun to see you all!

Kuh, Duh, Eh, Fuh and Guh

Hi everybody!
I have had a hard time keeping up with what Max has been learning at school because we've been traveling so much. Starting in mid-September either Kris or I have been out of town at any given time. This week is one of the first where we'll all be at home at the same time.
So we're behind on our report of what letters Max has learned. So we're doing something revolutionary to catch up. A cool video!! Below you will get to hear some of what Max has learned in the last few weeks. And you'll get to see him cheesing at the camera. What could be better?

I do have a couple of notes here though. Mostly about duh. On Duh week they learned about dogs and dinos and deer and dolphins (he told me later that day that dolphins eat "squids and shrimps") They ate dried apricots, dried pineapples and dried cranberries as well as deviled eggs (which Max LOVES) and doughnuts.
For Eh one day they had fried eggplant (did they seriously eat that??) and they talked about elections. We missed most of the Eh week.
This week is Guh and they've talked about geckos and goats and giraffes. Today for a snack they ate guacamole and chips! Yum! I wish I got guacamole and chips at my school.
The most impressive thing he's learned lately though is Russian. Yes, they're learning Russian at Max's school because the lady that runs the school, Miss Meela, is Russian. He's doing great and he keeps telling me random words. Today when I picked him up from school he went through a whole bunch of cards with pictures on them and told me what they were in Russian. I'm very impressed! So please witness for yourself.

Thanks for visiting! And dassvidanya (wow, can you tell that I don't speak Russian?)

Yay!

We're really excited today because Kris got invited out to USC's pediatric dentistry program for an interview in November. By this time next year we may be blogging from the beach! Keep your fingers crossed for us.

So far he also has an interview in Buffalo NY and one in New York City that also has programs in Rhode Island and Alaska. We're still waiting to hear back from a couple of other programs and so could have some other possibilities eventually. Results won't come out until the very end of January. USC is our favorite prospect right now for sure. We'll keep you all posted.