Falling Backwards

 For reasons that are unknown and annoying to me, my computer put these pictures in backwards and I refuse to fix it. So this is a story that starts with the treasure and works its way backwards. The treasure? Halloween loot!

The only good part about living in cookie cutter houses with your neighbor's wall one arm's length away is it makes trick-or-treating a fruitful breeze!

It's easy to see how the boys got so much candy after you see the detailed map they crafted for optimal trick-or-treating on Halloween night. 

In fact, drawing proved to be our number one coping strategy when dealing with our Halloween anticipation. Here's a spooky house Carson made. 

Lincoln drew himself in costume. 

Jonah drew a Frankenstein at school. 

And Eli drew his dream room (...basically his same room minus the sharing-it-with-a-brother part). 

Here's a book that inspired Jonah...

to draw a Halloween cat. 

I made the mistake of volunteering to be a trunk in the kids' school trunk-or-treat. Five Costco bags of candy later and I slid into the driver's seat of the car to hide from the continuous mob of kids. I ended up being trapped for the entire 3 hours of the event while Jeff took the boys off to our ward trunk-or-treat that was the same night. Too! Much! Candy!

Have you begun to notice Jonah has commitment issues?

The issue isn't that he couldn't commit...it's that he's too committed to Link. I bought him a fireman costume this year which he wore to trunk-or-treat, but by Halloween night, he just couldn't bring himself to not be Link.

Eli and Carson specifically requested store bought costumes. The end of an era. 

At one point Lincoln was wanting to be an Army guy in a tank, and boy am I glad Jeff found this costume on Amazon so that I didn't have to craft a single thing. That's right boys, I'm as over me handmaking costumes as you are!

We made a trip to Cedar City for new baby Porter's blessing. 

As always, Mary had some fun fall activities for the kids. 

And then we hit up The Pizza Factory for lunch with cousins on Monday!

We've hit rewind all the way to the beginning of October for General Conference. 

Puzzles were aplenty. 

As were the ebelskivers! 

I finally got Eli in for a well-child exam where we found out he could use some glasses! 

Our ward participated in a service project at Gilcrease Orchard. We helped them create the corn maze. It was fun to see how they did it, and our kids got to do the corn maze approximately 2,549 times by the time we were done!

And YOU made it through this backwards maze of a blogpost!