A Visit With My Parents, A Happy Halloween, and News From The Sandbox

My parents came to visit us from Oct 24 until Oct 29. We had a really fun time, and they sure helped me out (dishes, laundry, reading with Camilla, babysitting, the list goes on). Their visit also facilitated being able to make spudnuts (something I was dreading doing on my own).

As you can see, everyone is enjoying them.

Also, their visit coincided with Mary Emma's first birthday.


When thinking about what I would do for her cake, the thought "The Big Red 1" kept popping into my head, and I finally gave in. For those of you not at Ft. Riley, The Big Red 1 means first division, which is Jacob's division, but it goes a lot farther than that. It is a big Ft. Riley thing. And so Mary Emma had a military centric cake (did you notice it is also red, white, and blue.)

Mary wants to touch the candle.

Opening presents, well, not actually, all she is doing is playing with the ribbons, as we try to keep her over anxious brother and sister from opening them for her. It's her birthday, if she wants to just eat the ribbons, then let her!

She finally got one opened (with help of course).

Carving pumpkins was another task I couldn't handle on my own this year.

The finished project.

Sadly my parents had to leave before Halloween, but we had a good time anyway. If you can't tell, Hyrum is Spiderman, Mary Emma is a ballerina, and Camilla is a cat.

At the trunk or treat.

Now, news from the sandbox. As if being our church's group leader isn't enough, Jacob is now helping out with Catholic services. This is what he says, " The Catholic Priest is polish and speaks several languages and of course one of them is Russian. I discovered this last week. Leaving the Catholic service this morning he pointed to an LT sitting a little ways off saying, "she speaks Russian too." So I go over there and we speak in Russian for a bit. She is from the Ukraine, so we compared what cities we've been too and lived in, etc. I was given a calling in the Catholic Church today, Music Chair. I'm in charge of music. That means I pick the music and am in charge of the choir. Basically, I just play for the hour long service. Playing the church music is like playing out of a "Fake Book,"you know, the music with only the right hand written and I have to come up with the left. This is worse, there are no chords written above the staff or anything, so basically, I'm shooting from the hip. Wow, I just keep shaking my head. Life in the army is so full of variety and adventurous."