Fall Favorites

Here are some random pictures from my phone camera that didn't get their own post, but are still worth a mention...

When I was at work one evening, I got this text from my sister, Kristin.  Looks like there's another baby coming to this family at the end of April...

 Our cute little kindergarten carpool--Hazel, Juliet, Vivvie, Samuel, and Lincoln...

Every fall, the school holds a carnival--which is just code for "come pay us a lot of money and we'll let you stand in really long lines all evening".  And yet, every year, we continue to go.  Here's some pictures from the night...

Connor waited in line all evening for a cotton candy.  You may think that's an exaggeration, but it's not.  He waited all evening.  I hope it was delicious...

Mike and I took Cohen and Aiden on a group date to the Museum of Natural Curiosity and then out for ice cream.  Of course it involved ice cream...

I love that these brothers love each other so much...

Dance friends--Ashton, Hazel & Sadie Berry with Vivvie and Ella...

Work selfie...

One night while I was at work, Kristin sent me these lovely little Snapchat creations.  I now know what Mike would look like as a California surfer, and what my sister looks like as a man...

I also know what Connor would look like as a girl, and what Kristin looks like as a teenage boy (that wears makeup)...

Connor's 8th Grade picture...

Aiden's 5th Grade picture...

Cohen's 2nd Grade picture...

Vivvie's Kindergarten picture...

Viv and I on a date to the movies...

Mike found this huge caterpillar in our vegetable garden.  Apparently, they are really bad and eat all your plants, but he made for some fun entertainment for Vivvie and her friend...

Seriously, that thing was so huge...

I'm pretty sure that I wrote about the horrendous experience I had a few years ago while being a chaperone on Cohen's Kindergarten field trip to the zoo.  To jog your memory, I had a wild and crazy group that didn't want to stay together, and I actually lost one of my kids for a few minutes, and had to make "the call of shame" to the teacher telling her that I had lost one of the kids.  Luckily, we found her shortly after, but--in that moment--I swore off ever chaperoning a field trip to the zoo ever again.  And yet, somehow, just a few short years later, I found myself on a bus headed toward the zoo with a bunch of Kindergartners...

Luckily, this field trip was very different from the one a couple years earlier.  First of all, my group had no problem staying together.  Second, the zoo was totally dead while we were there, so the kids could walk away a few feet and I could still see them.  It made all the difference...

Looking at the giraffes...

And the elephants...

We got to watch one of the elephants get a little physical from his trainer.  It was really fun to see them so close...

We went to the bird show, which was really cool...

And stopped to see the rhinos before all was said and done...

And, of course, we had to take pictures by all the statues...

It was a great morning, and it may have helped me conquer my field trip phobia.  Maybe.  Oh, and it wore little Viv right out.  She slept the whole way home...

Mike, the boys, and I were all able to go watch a session of General Conference live in the Conference Center.  I realized that in just a couple years, our whole family can go together...

Ice cream with Connor...

A cool hairstyle I did with Viv's hair.  She wanted a bow in her hair, so I did my best and this was the end result...

Remember the mullet wig I talked about in my Halloween post?  Well, Mike tried it on one night, and suddenly I felt like I was married to Billy Rae Cyrus...

Cheesecake Factory for my birthday...

And, all the sweet cards and treats I woke up to on my birthday as I was running out the door to work...

Amy got me a cake at work, and made me even blow out the candles...

In between shows, I was able to come home for a little while to eat dinner and have cake and ice cream with my family.  Dad's birthday is only two days after mine, so we tend to have joint parties...

The boys had a piano recital in October, and they all did great!  I'm so impressed with how far they've come in just a year.  Here's piano teacher, Ashlee, with all her students...

Afterward, we all went to Culver's for...what else?  Ice cream...

Cohen and I went on a date to Trafalga right before Halloween.  We were surprised to find a big fall festival going on there.  It was fun!  There were lots of fun places to take pictures...

A hay maze to get lost in...

And ramps to ride sleds down into a big corn pit...

Cohen was able to really fly down those ramps...

He did some normal stuff too, like driving the go carts...

They also had lots of bouncy houses...

And lots of fun places to take pictures...

They had also turned their glow-in-the-dark miniature golf course into a Halloween-themed scavenger hunt.  If you could find all the items listed on the piece of paper, you got a treat.  All the activities were really fun...

Then we finished up the night with (pause for dramatic effect) ice cream...

Speaking of Cohen, he is such a ladies man!  The girls just flock to him.  They always have.  This little girl named Alexa has given her number to Cohen multiple times this year.  She's probably frustrated that he hasn't called her yet.  But, maybe she needs to relearn her phone number because it's always one digit too long.  Haha...

The company Mike works for has a fun little Halloween party for families every year.  Each department gets to decorate a room however they want, and the kids get to go through each one.  Mike's department made their own Super Mario World, complete with boxes hanging from the ceiling that the kids had to hit with their heads (like Mario).  If they hit them hard enough, candy would come out of the top.  It was really creative...

Mike's chili tied for 2nd Place at our ward's annual Chili Cookoff.  Unfortunately, there weren't two 2nd Place trophies, so Mike ended up getting the one for 3rd.  He was still pretty happy though...

My mom met me at work in between my evening shows one night, and we rode Trax up to City Creek for some dinner and shopping.  It was a fun little outing...

Mike took his birthday off of work, so the two of us went out to breakfast all by ourselves at Cubby's.  It was so yummy, and nice to get a little date in while all the kids were at school...

Then, later that week, we went out to dinner.  Mike picked Tsunami, which is sushi.  I wasn't excited because I'm not a seafood fan, but I was able to find some vegetarian rolls and other food that was delicious!  It may be one of my new favorite restaurants...

My parents grew these little miniature pumpkins in their garden this year.  They had so many that they shared some with me, and I used them to fill my cornucopia for Thanksgiving...

Another fun Vivvie hairstyle.  She wanted her hair to look like Belle's when she's dancing with the Beast.  This is what I came up with...

We were able to go see a pre-screening of Extreme Weather 3D at the Clark Planetarium...

Afterward, we had a good time playing with all the cool exhibits there...

They all especially loved playing with the green screen...

And, I'm pretty sure they all have a new-found respect for me and what I do...

Aiden was in a car accident in November while coming home from a scout campout.  The car he was in was rear ended by a car going 40-50 mph.  When you see the pictures, you can see that they were definitely watched over during the whole thing because they all walked away without serious injury.  They were towing a tent trailer which took most the impact of the crash...

The tent trailer was pushed into the minivan...

Luckily, the propane tanks stayed in tact and didn't explode...

The hole created by the trailer as it was shoved into the back of the van...

That is the trailer hitch, which pushed all the way up to the back row of seats and then miraculously stopped...

See how you can see it just beginning to come through the seat right before it stopped.  None of the boys were seriously injured in an accident where many of them could have been very hurt or even killed.  They were clearly watched over this day.  So grateful they were protected...

You know winter has hit when you can't see out of your windows on one side of your house...

A quick date with Aiden to the Dinosaur Museum.  They had a traveling exhibit there about geometry, which was kind of fun...

Then we went through the rest of the museum, and Aiden taught me all about dinosaurs...

And, we narrowly missed being eaten by a gigantic shark...

As Aiden was digging for dinosaur bones, he asked me if I knew what kind of dinosaur I thought he was discovering.  He then went on to tell me that he believed it looked like a Doedicurus.  Uhhhhhh, I hadn't even heard of a Doedicurus before.  A quick google search revealed that there really is a dinosaur called Doedicurus, and that it looked a lot like the bones he was uncovering.  I also had to google how to even spell Doedicurus.  That's when you know your kid is smarter than you...

And, every future paleontologist needs to end a hard day's work with some ice cream...

When the boys went to Moab with Poppy, Vivvie got a little bored.  So, Mike and I took her to the Museum of Natural Curiosity one evening for a little date...

Life is pretty easy when the parents outnumber the kids.  Why did we think life was so hard all those years ago when we just had one child?!?

And, finally, we'll end this post with a selfie fail involving niece Lila.  She smacked me right in the face as we took the picture.  Haha...

So, there you go!  Those are some of our favorite random moments from throughout the fall season.  --Lindsay