spooooky socialization

Ben & I threw our first real party last night!

Success :)

With Halloween falling on the Sabbath, we kept it pretty chill. The invitations called for pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, boo-nilla shakes, and spooooky socialization. We invited 22 of our closest friends and the turn-out? Amazing! All but one came! Our not-overly-spacious kitchen and living room were packed!

The biggest hit was our boo-nilla shakes. To make, you melt chocolate chips and paint ghost faces on the insides of glasses with a small paintbrush. Then you fill it with (white) vanilla shake and it becomes a ghost!

Don't you just love the pumpkins? They were our only Halloween decoration this year, but I've grown rather fond of them. This was our food table - lots of cookies, bowls of candy, and the big bowl was for candy that guests brought for "communal trick-or-treating!" Haha!

This is one of my dearest, dearest friends Joanna. She picked the "boo face" that Ben thought was a bikini. He said if I drew a string all the way around the sides with a bow in the back it would have been perfect! Haha. We topped all of the shakes with whipped cream, orange and black sprinkles, and a straw for some extra-festiveness.

This is Sami and Blue, respectively, with their cute "boo faces!"

This is a couple I just adore - Sierra, who I've been rooming with since we lived next door to each other in the dorms, and Jeff, the boy she's been dating since their senior year of high school who recently returned from a mission in Switzerland! How lovely. ;) I totally didn't think Sierra would make the drive all the way down from Salt Lake, but she completely surprised me and I may or may have let out a small yelp when I saw her in the doorway! Yess! :)

Just a glimpse of our living room -

Ben manned the blender all night and was the ultimate shake-maker! He got lots of compliments on his shake consistency. Finally, we got to enjoy shakes of our own and he picked this cute guy.

When everyone left, Jo and Si (with their men) stayed for an extra hour and we laughed and laughed about old times living together. Think: troll-like hair do's for past Halloweens and getting pulled over by a cop, many nights of sissy girls wrestling, and Taylor, the latte boy. It was a blast. Love love love! :)

Other Halloween-weekend events included

- our ward party = so much fun! Who would have thought that a married-ward-with-lots-of-kids party would be wayyy more fun than a single's ward party? First, the little kids trick-or-treated to all of the classrooms, then we had doughnuts and hot chocolate while watching the kids parade their costumes across the stage, and then we played several games as a ward. We had SO much fun and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Yay!

- seeing Inception at the dollar theater. Have you seen it? It was so . . . well, I don't really know what happened. I don't even know if I liked it or not! Either way, it was great fun all the same.

Also, Ben had a great visit to the Ernst & Young office in San Fran last week (Perfect, with the Giant's wins and all!) and he is prepping for a trip to PwC in Manhattan this week! Wa-hoo!

check out . . .

. . . this sweet bruise I got from jazz class. There are identical ones on my other knee, my hip bones, and my ankle bones. Who knew?

. . . my jack-o-lantern toe nails for a little Halloween spirit! I heart them!

. . . our Palmyra ponchos we wore to the rainy BYU football game against Wyoming last Saturday! We just knew they'd come in handy again!

. . . 109 pumpkin chocolate chip cookies! (gahh!)

Yesterday was my Sunday to teach Relief Society (I don't think I've ever loved a calling this much :) and it was on two conference talks, both about being mothers and nurturing and teaching children in the home. So, I began by asking "What is the best part about being a kid at Church?" Everyone answered "treats" as I pulled out bags of cookies from inside the podium! Everyone loved it and I got a good laugh.

Now you may be wondering, are there 109 Relief Society sisters in the BYU 44th ward? Certainly not. But . . . last time I made these cookies, 1 batch = 18 cookies. So, quadruple the recipe and get 72 cookies, perfect for our 71 sister Relief Society. But, as Ben figured out in his head in like 4 seconds, I made the right amount of dough, but I made the cookies only 2/3 the size as I did last time! Hence, 109 cookies. It took 3 1/2 hours to bake them all!

. . . our nifty BYU football Pez. Before the football game on Saturday, we went to a PwC tailgate/congratulations for making it to the 2nd round of interviews party. Before Ben flies to NYC next week, they wanted to butter him up. On each table were all kinds of goodies. I came away with BYU beads, BYU tattoos, a PwC notepad, and some PwC cups. Ben's only desire was the BYU football pez. When we got home, it was promptly placed on top of the TV. I told Ben I was going to take it down when our home teachers came over, but he pointed to my Ikea shelf and asked why I could have all of those decorations and he couldn't even have one! Hahaha, good argument, my man. The pez remains. :)

I asked Ben to smile for the camera & I got the tush.

Isn't he a stud?

Hand. Some.

Caramel chocolate malt in a chocolate waffle cone joy.

cougar blue

We kinda got stuck in the Homecoming Parade that was marching back into the SFH and RB parking lot . . . so Cosmo helped us turn around. Cosmo is so cool.

A little football game lovin'.

home improvement

way before:

before:

now:

doesn't it look so much more home-y? we love it. my latest project has been painting picture frames for wedding photos to go on our living room wall. the frames are from ikea - cheap and wonderful, and i painted them egg plant, ivory, hunter green, and chocolate bar brown to pull some of the colors from our wedding photos. many, many thanks to ashley henderson for the suggestion of using gm velcro stickies to hang them on our cinder-block walls! they look great and i am SO excited!

next time we drive past ikea and it's not on a sunday, i'm going to get two more larger picture frames - one for the family proclamation and one for our marriage certificate. i'll hang these with a large picture of ben & i in front of the temple and our picture of the Savior on the other wall.

close-up:

another view:

siblings

I was telling Ben tonight about a certain kitchen table occurrence when Scott and I were little. The bad words in our house at the time were "dumb", "stupid", and "poopy-head". Scott said the prayer at the dinner table this night and as soon as he said "amen", he looked up, said "Dumb, stupid, poopy-head!" and ran to his room because he knew he'd be in trouble. Hahaha!

Anyway, pretty much all of the photos on my phone are ones Dad has sent me over the past year or so. I look at them every now and again and I thought it was time to share because, frankly, my siblings are dang hilarious. Enjoy! :)

Love, love, love them and can't wait to see them next month for Turkey-Day! :)