The Brown Bunch: 12/2/12

How I have time to post right now, I'm still not sure. The holiday stress has hit. So much to do and time just keeps leaking away. Thanks to Preston, Alisha Bell and mostly my dear Father in Heaven, everything is under control for now and I am getting a lot done every day. I just love crossing off my list!

At this point, I have to be realistic and accept the fact that I will never be posting all the posts I have envisioned in the last couple of months because there are always new things happening. But, I can certainly try to post a few thoughts and memories mingled with pictures to catch up. We'll start from now and see how far back we can get. Get ready, because here I go. And you know how picture crazy I can get!!

First of all, I have developed some unkind feelings toward HP printer ink. I just bought new ink ($50 btw) using some of my "Angie's spending money" which I only get from birthdays, Christmas and garage sales, so it can get sparse. But that's not the point. The point is, I buy it because I love printing things for visiting teaching and right now especially for Primary. But, after printing 2 documents (with some little pitures. . . about 20 small ones total), my printer was telling me my ink was almost out!! Not to mention the brand new yellow ink wouldn't be accepted by the printer. It said it was missing. After several back and forth emails with HP they gave me some things to try and it did work. So I printed one page of pictures on Saturday night and then a warning came up that yellow was almost empty. Grrr... here are those unkind feelings again. I better stop.

On a happier note, I was able to order all our Christmas cards and 3 calendar gifts today all for $10 (+shipping) from a living social deal I purchased in October. Can't beat that!

Also happy, my house is actually festive this year! We're never home on Christmas so we haven't ever set up outdoor lights here, but this year we bought a new pre-lit tree so we actually had enough lights to do decent decorating outside. Despite the fact that there are 4 chunks of lights that are burned out, it looks really good at night! It makes me happy. Our tree is up and I like to burn Christmasy candles and it just makes me smile. I love Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, here's some Christmas pancakes that Preston crafted for our Saturday night dinner. There were trees, candy canes, and Santa hats. We have had some fun culinary successes you can find below!

DECORATING FOR CHRISTMAS

We got all the lights outside (although a third is burned out. Haha) and set up inside too. This is the day after Thanksgiving when we bought and set up our tree. The boys loved it! Brayden couldn't fall asleep that night unless he was on the couch by the tree. Hahaha.

THANKSGIVING

We had our friend family, The Bells, over and they made some amazing food to go along with ours. It turned out delicious. And we used our fancy chargers and everything :)

Zander and Anson playing

We set up this puzzle over the weekend after Thanksgiving. It's been a while since we did a puzzle, but it was fun! And I love Eric Dowdle puzzles/pictures.

Brayden playing the harp. He tips it on his shoulder and everything!

FAMILY PHOTO SHOOT

We had a bright idea to sleepover at the Bell's house and then take each other's pictures the next day. It was a ton of fun, but the kids were not in a picture mode. So, Alisha did a great job capturing them on the go.

Just playin together

Grandy was here to visit again and got to be here for Halloween. She actually came to go to Universal and Disney with us one last time before our tickets expired in November. We tried to go a bunch of times in October.

Brayden likes to help out and was carrying the recycling bin back.

Pumpkin rice pudding. This was a fun thing to make, but it seemed like it was lacking some important flavor for rice pudding. I couldn't figure it out. But it did look cool in the pumpkin!

Just playing at the park!

HALLOWEEN

I made some fun Halloween dinner. Intestines and jello worms. It was quite yummy actually. The intestines are puff pastries filled with a ground pork filling with potato, carrot, onion and a tiny bit of sauces and seasonings. The jello worms are, well, jello.

Cute little couple, I mean friends.

One of our neighbor's built a "cemetery" in his driveway and yard. It was pretty intense. He said he just likes to do it. His birthday is Halloween and that's how he likes celebrating.

Tossing corn the neighbors set out for dear.

Pooped after trick-or-treating

WARD FALL FESTIVAL

The Brown's pumpkin patch

Brayden's favorite ward person (one of them), Sister Delp. He sits with her almost every week during Sacrament meeting lately.

Our trunk for the trunk-or-treat.

Another fun culinary success. Spaghetti inside garlic bread. Brayden had a lot of fun helping me (and stealing bites of course). I hadn't even thought of it as a mummy, but then Brayden rolled some little dough pieces and told me they were for his eyes. Haha. We had been talking about mummy's because of his shirt. That might have had something to do with it. Either way, it made for a cute day-before-Halloween meal.

The Mummy before baking

ORLANDO

Like I said, my mom came so she could go to the theme parks with us one last time. We always make the temple part of our Orlando visits too.

After I took the picture, Zander inched forward a bit more and then bent over to sniff and totally fell face first into the dirt because he was too close to the edge. Poor guy.