Bekah's 6th Birthday Party!

Since Bekah's 6th birthday falls on Thanksgiving, we celebrated a week early this year. She wanted a Barbie party complete with a Barbie "stick-in" cake! Thanks to my neighbor, Sonja, she was able to have this beautiful birthday cake!

Her party began at 6:30 last Friday night. She wanted pizza for dinner. I think she thinks pizza is the only acceptable birthday party food!

After dinner the girls watched the Barbie-Nutcracker movie, kind of. They alternated between watching the movie with getting up and playing!

Then it was time for presents and cake! For some reason, Bekah had a very hard time blowing out the candles.

Here are are the girls in their serious pose.

And the ballerina pose (since they were all dancing to the Nutcracker.)

And the silly pose!

Bekah just showing off for the camera! Yeah, she's cool...she's 6!

And they all got ready to sleep. But mostly they talked and played and didn't do too much sleeping! (But, hey, it's only one night a year, right?)

Bekah chose Cinnamon Life cereal for her sleepover breakfast. And then we treated them to another piece of cake after breakfast. (Because the more they ate, the less Mommy has to eat!) Then it was time to get everybody dressed and send them home. I think Bekah had a very enjoyable birthday party.

Oratorio Chorus Concert

Tuesday night was Todd's Oratorio Chorus concert. They were accompanied by the Seminary Orchestra and presented John Rutter's Te Deum, Gerald Finzi's Magnificat, and Gabriel Faure's Requiem. Of course they did an excellent job! The kids enjoyed seeing all the different instruments and Brandon enjoyed trying to follow along with the Latin words that were printed in the program (along with their English translation).
Before the concert I was talking with Bekah about it. She was asking about what instruments she would see and she asked how many people would be singing. I told her about some of the orchestra instruments and told her there might be about 50 people singing. Then she asked, "will they me movin' and groovin'?" I laughed and said, "no, not really." Then she said, "So, it won't be like Metallica?"
So, it was not at all like Metallica, but still good! Here are some pictures:

Todd is right in the middle beside the conductor's hand!

Here's a closer up shot! Yes, it's blurry, because I know nothing about how to use Todd's camera!

After the show!

We're all proud of Todd and all the hard work he put into this!! We even went out for dessert afterwards to celebrate!

Keepers Club

Today was Bekah's monthly Keepers Club meeting. Here is a shot of the whole group.

The badge they worked on today was painting. Of course this was something Bekah loved!! They painted little treasure boxes.

Here are Bekah and Maddie's finished products.
I am thankful that Bekah gets to be a part of this group of girls to make some great friends and have lots of fun!

Halloween

I like it when I don't have to spend any money on Halloweeen costumes for the kids! This year Bekah decided to wear her dance recital outfit and be Shirley Temple. Brandon wanted to be an army soldier, which he had already been before, so he had all the stuff already. I had bought him some camo pants just to wear, so we added the new pants to the stuff he had from last time and he was ready to go!

This was Bekah getting her hair curled for the evening!

Bekah is showing off those curls!

Here is the whole Summer Place gang ready to go trick or treating!

Getting candy!

After trick or treat we had dinner with Steve, Carl, Sara and Ellie. Ellie was the cutest little lion!

And Carl was a cowboy. We had a belated birthday celebration for Carl's birthday with some yummy pie Sara made!

Finally, as is our family tradition, we watched the movie Luther in honor of Reformation Day!

Pumpkin Carving

We try to make Friday nights family night at our house and come up with an activity or something fun for us all to do together. Last Friday night the perfect thing to do was to carve pumpkins together!

While we were carving pumpkins, our doorbell rang. When the kids went to the door, there was no one there, but there was a bag of treats and a sign that said "You have been boo'd!" The treats in the bag included these silly glasses!

Everyone is hard at work!

Brandon is designing his pumpkin face.

Bekah is designing her face, complete with eyelashes!

Oooooh, pumpkin guts!

Bekah is picking out the seeds. The kids had never tasted toasted pumpkin seeds, so we did that this year. They both decided that they taste okay, but not great.

This is the master carver hard at work!

The end results! This is Brandon's pumpkin along with Todd's fish.

Bekah's pumpkin and Todd's cross.

We all had a fun time working on our pumpkins. We talked with the kids about how pumpkins are like us. We are filled with lots of yucky stuff. When we become Christians, God takes our yucky stuff (sin) away and He places His light inside us. We get a new "face" or a new life in Him! Then we are to shine His light for all the world to see!

Trick or Treat

I have more pictures to post, but here is a quick one of Shirley Temple and an Army soldier!