The Puppy and The Mailman

Halloween this year was EXTRA memorable for at least 3 reasons:
1) Grandma Benson was here!!
2) Carter was actually something other than a marine!!
3) Our powder room toilet flooded spilling water through the wall and all over our master bathroom/closets (yuck).

Though it was raining we still perservered and did a respectable amount of trick-or-treating with our friends the Sessions and our sweet Grandma. Ellie was a freezing ball of stickiness when we got home but she LOVED it. I made Carter and Ellie messenger bags to put their candy in AND my sisters Brittany and Bonnie collaborated to make all the nieces and nephews super cute Halloween bags so there were plenty of places to put candy and carry it all over the house. There is an immensely talented woman in our ward who turned the bags I made into true awesomeness with the personalized monograms. I thought they looked amazing and Carter still wears his costume for dress-up (yes, I said dress-up).

Our ward had their trunk-or-treat at our old Bishops Christmas tree farm and the kids waited almost a half hour in the cold drizzle because Carter really wanted to go on a hay ride. The happy memory will have been well worth the wait! Joe was the chili cook-off judge and he took his responsibility very seriously. He was a fair, unpartial though sometimes harsh judge :).

Couple of extra confessions:
1)okay, our neighborhood had a big halloween party the week before Halloween and I didn't have their costumes ready sooooo....they were both marines...
2)we totally grew the big pumpkin in that picture!! Carter couldn't bear to cut into it so a little permanent marker turned it into a masterpiece.

Our $30 zuchini

If our vegetables continue to grow at the sparse snails pace they have been then this, our first zuchini, cost us about $30 to grow! I think I mentioned before that between the lumber, dirt, seeds and plants it wasn't cheap to put this garden together and Carter and I have not produced much vegetation (though Carter doesn't know that- he thinks the garden is awesome and fruitful :) but I tell myself this is my learning year. I have never grown my own garden before- and gardening in the south is a whole new ball game with different bugs than we had back in Kansas (where I grew up) and our soil here stinks as well. In one picture Carter is holding our beautiful zuchini as well as a shrimpy store bought zuchini- he was pretty proud of how great ours looked. We sauteed them up with some olive oil, onion and garlic salt and it was delicious! We now have a whole one pumpkin growing as well as one banana squash and lots of tomatoes- maybe things are looking up for the Benson garden!

My Monkey

All who see Ellie on a regular basis know that her hair is almost always stuck up in a "Pebbles" style ponytail on top of her head. Her hair doesn't grow well on the sides so I don't have many options. She was sitting so happily on my counter the other day, playing in my sink, so I experimented with a few new do's. I showed Carter and he said:

"Uh, Mom- she looks like a monkey".

So we took it out and went with the "Pebbles" ponytail once again!

Carter, me and our green thumbs!

I figured that I needed to grow a garden this year. I told Joe we would save lots of money on vegetables but when you factor in the cost of the wood for the raised bed, the dirt, the seeds, the plants and the fact that we have only harvested 6 tomatoes and some peas we are definitely just counting it as a learning experience instead. For some reason we grow beautiful pumpkin vines, squash plants and watermelon plants but NO ACTUAL VEGETABLES themselves. If anyone knows why that would be please let me know. The first thing Carter asks EVERY morning is to go look at our tomatoes and peas- thankfully they grow okay. He loves it when the tomatoes start to turn orangey-red and his eyes shine with excitement. That is all I need to remind me of why we are growing a garden!

Grandma Time!

Well this is another post that is a few months late in coming! We are so blessed to have a Grandma Benson- everyone should be so lucky! Joe's Mom is amazing and every time we see her the trips are too short, and we miss her like crazy when she goes. We love you Grandma!!

Ode To Brittany

Many moons ago (almost 3 months!) my sister Brittany and her brave husband James drove 16 whole hours here with their entire family (three kids 5 and under AND Britt's pregnant with #4) in the ultimate show of love. My sister is one of those supermom's who puts all of us to shame and I always enjoy being around her and gleaning tidbits of her vast mommy knowledge. In my almost 2 weeks with her I learned many things. Here is a brief list:

--How to do Ellie's hair with elastics!
--How to cook ribs and onions straws
--That chalk + spray bottles= hours of entertainment
--How to make a raised bed garden planter
--That I can and should make my own jam
--That you can easily fit two adults, five kids AND an Ikea bookcase in one minivan (Joe- I want one!!)
--Dollar stores are indeed awesome
--You can be pregnant and dang cute
--every mommy needs a power nap (there's no shame in it)
--And, she lives MUCH MUCH MUCh too far away...

And a big shout out to James for being totally awesome and finishing Joe's entire honey-do list. Joe is quite pleased that I no longer nag him about all of those things:). I have, of course, found plenty of other things to nag him about.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Somehow I have no pictures of James, darn! And I forgot to mention that Grandma Bensons trip overlapped a little and all the kiddos LOVED her (no surprise there:).

By jove, I think he's got it!

So after almost 6 years of marriage I do believe that Joe is beginning to "get" me! Thursday night I put the kiddos to bed and ran to see a movie with the ladies in my ward and when I came home I found an almost completely clean AND vacuumed house AND he had put all my dirt into my raised garden bed (something I have been procrastinating because there were 10 bags and each was 40 pounds). I noticed the second I walked in the door and my jaw literally dropped. It's not that Joe doesn't help around the house much (well, even he would admit he doesn't) but only a few times in our marriage has he ever done something all on his own like this. He said he did it because the next day was my birthday. It was the perfect gift! EXACTLY what I would want- he finally gets me!