Cousins

First of all, can I just tell you how much I love having Kira living close to me?  I love spending time with her and her family!  Second, I love that she had a little girl.  I'm not sure what our baby is going to be, still thinking it's a girl, but Madelynn will always have Teah to play and with and be a girl with on the Carbine side.  I love that!

Teah and Madelynn reading a book

Happy Halloween!!

Halloween at our house has become a day of great chaos in our family.  I enjoy the quiet of the day while the kids are in school and then once they come in the door... BAM!  It's on account of us having so much family we need to visit and me never wanting to turn anyone down.  But we are fortunate to have so much family around to be with and I chose this so it's all good, just busy.  It starts out with me taking the kids to Ben's work for trick-or-treating, a tradition that the kids love and look forward to and gets us a lot of good candy.  One of Ben's bosses dressed up as Grover this year and stood around in a hot costume greeting all the kids.  He sounded just like Grover and was so cute to take time with the kids!  My kids (sadly) don't really know who Grover is since they thrive on Disney, but I loved it!  Next we rushed off to Becky's house to visit with Becky.  Halloween is her favorite holiday so she always goes all out and makes all the nieces and nephews HUGE treat bags with stickers and tattoos and scary stuff in it.  The kids love this!  This year she even set out cookies and punch and stuff for them too.  It was really neat!

Becky, Nicholas the storm trooper, Daniel the tiger, Alex the black ninja, Madelynn the duck, and Ben

Then it's off to visit grandmas and friends who live near by while we are in the van.  This year we hit up Dan and Shandi which was fun, they are really great friends and awesome to our kids!  Then home to trick-or-treat around the neighborhood.  Living in Old Lehi, we have yet to adopt the trunk-or-treat, which is both good and bad.  I love the old tradition of going door to door, but trunk-or-treating is so fast, you get to see a lot of people, it's safer, and pregnant mom doesn't have to walk very far.  Then we head to Grandma Larsen's house for chili, mummy dogs, spider web seven layer dip, and lots of good food.  Something healthy for a change on Halloween!!  Anyway, it's a lot of fun and we love spending holidays as a family with our family!

My Grandma The Witch

My grandma is a witch.  Did you know?  Every Halloween she transforms into a witch.  When we were little, we literally believed this to be true.  Anyway, since then, we have decided to embrace it and just accept that we have a long line of proud witch heritage and embrace being witches ourselves.  My grandma is a witch, my mom is a witch (ask any of her kids when we were teenagers, no truer words were spoken!), I'm a witch (my kids will testify this to be true), and Madelynn is a small witch in training (I can already tell the force is strong in this one).  Every year at our giant Gammon Halloween party, grandma takes the spotlight making witches brew (rootbeer) for the kids.  It's one of my favorite traditions and I thought I finally needed to document it since I know that unfortunately this isn't a tradition my posterity will always get to enjoy.

Bubble, bubble toil and trouble...

Carving Pumpkins

Tonight for family night, we decided we needed to get our pumpkins done before Halloween.  We gave the option of carving or painting this year which we anticipated would be a stressful mess (for me) but had no idea how "stressful mess" would blossom into "unbearable chaos" (for me).  Ben is better natured about it, probably because he isn't pregnant.  I need to learn to let go and just enjoy the moment and ignore the mess.  It's hard.  Anyway, we ended up having a fun time and made some interesting pumpkins.

Nicholas was the one child who wanted to carve a traditional pumpkin.  That's my boy!

I'm not quite sure why Madelynn is shirtless, but she is.

Getting the pumpkin ready and apparently stabbing it in the face 

BYU Game

Grandpa went out of town this weekend so he gave us his BYU football tickets and Ben and I took Nicholas with us to the game.  Nicholas was too shy to do much at first, but toward the end we got him to do some cheers and get into the game with us.  BYU killed Idaho, so toward the end when Nicholas got bored, it was no big deal to leave a little early.  Of course I got no pictures of the three of us, but we did get a picture of Nicholas riding the cougar outside of the stadium.  It was fun to spend some one on one time with one of our kids,  I hope he liked it as much as I did!

Nicholas riding the cougar outside of the stadium.

30 Weeks

So here we are at 30 weeks along.  I've probably said it before, but I have no idea where this baby is going to go!  I already look/feel so big!  Here's hoping the next ten weeks fly by! 

Disneyland!!

All of the overtime Ben had to work finally came to an end and we finally got to go to Disneyland!!  We had such a great time!  We left on Sunday which was Daniel's birthday and drove as far and Primm where we spent the night after a stop in St. George to let the kids run around and see the temple.  The next morning we woke up bright and early and were off the Anaheim.  We made a quick stop at a Disney outlet store to let the kids get their souvenirs and then made it to our hotel.  Since it was about lunch time, we decided not to go right to the park since we couldn't spend the whole day there and instead went to the beach for a few hours to have lunch and play in the ocean.  At first it was cloudy and cold, but soon the sun came out and the kids and Ben had a fun time playing in the sand and in the water.  I forgot my swim suit so I mostly just sat on a towel in the sun and watched.  Oh well.

Madelynn playing in the sand at the beach

 The next three days we spent between Disneyland and California Adventure. 

Mickey Pumpkin!!

One of the first things we did on the first day in Disneyland was Ben took the three boys on Splash Mountain (they really really really wanted to go!).  After the ride was over, a traumatized Alex and Nicholas decided they would never ride that again, but Daniel decided it was his favorite ride.  They then decided they wanted to go on Indiana Jones.  Daniel was too short so he went with me back to the hotel to start getting lunch ready while the others rode the ride.  Once again, traumatizing.  After that combo, the two older boys wouldn't go on any rides unless Madelynn and I were riding it.  Finally on the last day just hours before we had to leave the park, Nicholas tried a few bigger rides and saw that all rides are not scary and ended loving them.  We never did get Alex on anything bigger than Small World again though.  Guess he'll never trust us again.

Ben, Alex, Daniel, and Nicholas on Splash Mountain

 Since I'm mostly using pictures from my hone for this, I'm sad that I don't have better pictures to share, but the Splash Mountain picture is pretty priceless so at least I have that.  Anyway, Friday quickly came and it was time to go home.  We had to drive straight home since Ben had to go to work on Saturday morning.  About 40 minutes into our drive home, Daniel started throwing up.  All the way home.  I lost count how many times he threw up after about half a dozen times, all I know is that it was awful!  Unfortunately I had forgotten my wallet so that meant I also forgot my driver's license.  Ben kept offering to drop me off at the nearest airport with a couple of the kids, but since I had no I.D... :(  Needless to say, the drive home was very long and we were so happy to finally get home!  Not the way we wanted to end the trip, but at least we had fun before the ride home!