October 2022 Happenings

October is always a super busy month for me.  I'm making costumes, usually planning Halloween parties or happenings, making Halloween dinners every night, & then there's always a bunch of school activities thrown in as well.  This year was no exception.  October was jam packed with all sorts of fun.

First off. . . Lorien is a senior this year, (cue the mom tears) & will be graduating in June.  We got her senior photos taken early in the month & they turned out beautiful.  Lorien is such a beautiful girl.  I can't wait to see what adventures she will experience as an adult.  She's going to be amazing.

The first weekend in October was General Conference & we had a chance to watch it with the other members of the Stake Presidency.  We always love doing dinner, games, & conference with them all.  We love them like family.

October always gives the kids MANY opportunities to dress up.  For Homecoming week at the High School, one of the dress up days was "dress up like a character whose name starts with the same letter of your name."

Taya cracked me up by dressing up like Tulio from El Dorado.  Nobody knew who she was, but I thought she was hilarious.

Lorien opted for Luigi.

As always, the boys enjoyed their monthly activity day boys activities.  This month they built rockets.

We had stake conference this month which included a 3 hour training for our stake's seminary teachers & leadership.  Our area authority here lives in France & drove up to our training.  He brought with him many wonderful French goodies including baguettes & bread, macaron cookies, chocolate, & French cheese.  I love cheese.  But this cheese here made me a little scared.  That is MOLD.  And a LOT of MOLD.  He told me it was one of his favorites so I was brave & ate some & it turned out to be amazingly good.

We also had some fun piano songs completed this month.  Canyon finished learning "The Black Pearl" & Craiger conquered "Ghostbusters."

Taya got a fun game for her birthday like Telestrations, but called Sketchy Tales.  It's a Disney game where you get a prompt & a character (for example, Stitch living in a fridge . . . or Baymax giving a high five to a stick figure).  You draw it, then pass it to the next person who writes down on a new board what they think it is a picture of.  Then they pass that to the next person who has to draw what the person before them wrote.  It keeps getting passed along until you have a hilarious game of "telephone" via drawings & words.  Anyway, we've been playing it for Family Home Evening on Sunday nights, & Trek's pictures are absolutely hilarious.  We wind up laughing so hard at his that we can't even breath.

This is Baymax.  All the kids were howling at this.  They kept saying "Do you even know what Baymax looks like?  That is a ghost."

Then there's this beauty of "Ariel swinging on a vine" but it looks like a scary who knows what on a hook.

But our favorite this month was Bambi laying an egg.  Here you see Craiger (who is 11) who originally drew the first pic, & then Trek's version of the same prompt.  We couldn't even play anymore after this one.  We were laughing so hard we couldn't breath.

I had the opportunity to teach mutual on night this month.  They wanted me to teach the youth how to sew on a button & how how to repair a hole in their clothing.  It was a life skills night where I taught the same lesson to 6 different groups of kids.  It turned out really well & I think the kids had fun.

I also got to meet up with some old friends who were visiting while their daughter played volleyball here at Ramstein.  I haven't seen Jessica & Atu since we lived in Bitburg 13 years ago.  It was great to catch up over lunch.

Also in October we had a board game convention we spend the weekend at, Homecoming (for Taya & Lorien), several Halloween parties, a church Halloween dance, & more.

Of course on Halloween, my kids never want to wear their new cool costumes. . . they come up with "new" things they want to be.  Taya was Legolas one of the days, Lorien was a pirate fairy, & Craiger cracked me up when he asked to be John Williams (our favorite composer) for extra credit in band class.  He put together his costume himself & he was adorable.

On Halloween I got to do one thing that I love to do for myself. . . Zumba.  I love to dance & my dear friend Roxanne is the best instructor ever.  For Halloween we got to dress up in costumes & dance for an hour straight to Halloween music.  It was a blast.

And of course we had some fun playing with our costumes this year.  I'll have a post about them soon.  They turned out really really good.

October is always super busy, but super fun.  Happy Halloween everyone.