Partying with the Mia Maids...

For activity on Wednesday, the Mia Maids and I decided to have a surprise birthday party for the YW 1st counselor. We asked her husband about her favorite colors and cake and such. A couple of the girls came over at 6 and helped me to decorate...

This is Dominique (just an inch taller than me) trying to hang the streamers on the ceiling- Cassidy helped keep her up. We had so much fun decorating! We had streamers, balloons, confetti, and lots of candy on the table.

Well the Beehives decided to join us...here we are awaiting Sister Brown's arrival.


Surprise! I was behind the door but I heard she looked a bit startled when all the girls blew their birthday horns and the other leaders all shouted "Surprise!"


After the Personal Progress spiritual moment and value, we had some fun. Although the girls ended up in our hallway laughing hysterically. We all tried to figure out what was going on and what the girls found so funny- I didn't get it. They said the blood rushing to their heads just made them have the giggles...it was interesting. Mark was in the back room studying...when I went in he was working on a website- not much studying can get accomplished with a bunch of teenager girls giggling and shouting. He was a great sport though!


Here are three of my Mia Maids....Abby, Cassidy, and Dominique. Although I don't understand what was so funny...I love these girls! :)

Young Women's rendition of "Happy Birthday"...it was very theatrical, as you can see.

Blowing out the candles...you can see some of our fun decorations.

Well, after the girls left Mark decided to have some fun of his own. He tried to see how many balloons he could get to stick on me at once. You can only see three here, but at one point he had five. Who would have thought balloons could be so fun- we've had some fun wars with them since the party! :) We're just a bunch of kids ourselves.

What can I say, I'm goofy....

Halloween Night

Happy Halloween to everyone, we hope you all had lots of fun. Jodie and I wanted to have a special dinner and invite some of our friends over. So, here's a few pictures of us setting things up.

So, we decided to split up the tasks for dinner. Jodie was in charge of making the salads, bread and desert, cupcakes. I was in charge of making spaghetti and sauce. So, here's Jodie getting things ready for the salad (more pictures later of how it turned out).

With the spaghetti sauce, we wanted to make it black and dye the noodles orange. The noodles kind of worked, we should have used more dye in the beginning, but the spaghetti sauce turned out really good. So, here's what my sauce looked like in the pan, a few drops of black food coloring can make quite a difference.
Here's a picture of the spaghetti and sauce, you can't see it very well, but the noodles have an orange tinge to them. One thing I learned from this is how much color and appearance can affect the food. The sauce tasted very good, but you didn't expect it at all because of the color. Once you put the parmesan cheese on it, it really looked like you were eating worms and dirt; not intentional, but still fit perfectly for our Halloween dinner.So, here's a picture of the salads that Jodie made- they were pumpkin faces. I thought it was very clever and they turned out very nicely.Here's another picture. She used orange bell peppers to make the pumpkin, olives for the eyes, celery for the nose, and a tomato for the mouth.

Here's the dinner once we got everything set up. Jodie also made french bread with a green spread on it. We didn't get a picture of that.

So, here's our group for dinner. Although, Jodie's brother Shaun come over later that night for a late dinner. Apparently our spaghetti was a little too gross for him and he had a hard time keeping it down. One of our friends, Kitt, he's sitting next to me, brought over some piña colada mix and made some smoothies for us- they were very, very delicious.
Just in case anyone was wondering what it looked like when you were eating it, here it is. It was totally unintentional, but worked out perfectly for our spooky Halloween dinner. Despite its appearance, it tasted very good.Here's our last picture. This is the tree that is right out of our window. It's very pretty colors, nice red and yellow. However, I'm glad that I snapped this picture yesterday because this morning it rained pretty hard and knocked down at least half of the leaves on the tree. So, much to our dismay, its starting to look more and more like winter. But, I thought that I would post that for anyone who wanted to see some of the nice fall colors we get here in Provo.