Bucket List and Birthday

This week ended with celebrating Jordan's 13th birthday. He and I attempted to watch scary movies Friday night, but 45 minutes into The Messengers we decided it was a bit intense to watch after 9pm and switched to Beatlejuice followed by The Mummy. After staying up late watching movies I was blessed to witness the joy of having a teenager sleep in, Jordan slept in until just about noon.

After everyone was finally up and moving we set out on our pumpkin count walk. We have noticed the last few weeks that many people in our neighborhood didn't have pumpkins on display, so we headed over by the boys' school to the neighborhood behind the school. This is a neighborhood Jordan I walk just about everyday while we wait for the younger two get released from school. I downloaded an app to see how far we walk. It only took us about 45 minutes to walk a little over 1.30 miles and we were able to locate 163 pumpkins; Jacob says he spotted 164, we must have missed one. The boys were not shy about walked up  someone's driveway to get a closer look at the pumpkins to make sure we got an accurate count.

On the way home from our walk we stopped at the store to gather what we needed to make gingerbread monster cookies. Luck was not on our side as there was no gingerbread cookie mixes/dough to be found, we opted for sugar cookies instead. The boys chose some chocolates to use to decorate with and some frosting tubes; as we don't have any dyed frosting at home and our dye-free sprinkles/food dyes are expensive. Once home we realized the gingerbread man shaped cookie cutter is at Grandma's house, and switched to using Halloween theme cutters. They cut their own cookies as well as decorated them. Anything went, they wanted to stack chocolate and then coat the chocolates with frosting...sure, they wanted to load their cookies with icing...sure. It was their creations they could add whatever they wanted to them, with the understanding that whatever they put on them they themselves would be willing to eat. The boys did great and used just about all the frosting and their cookies were very creative. Some of them looked so sweet, you could have gotten a cavity just by looking at them.



He received some Aero shirts,
pajama pants, cologne, iPod charger,
& a gift card for Barnes & Nobles

Saturday evening Jordan headed out to stay the night at his cousin's house, Joey built a Lego rollercoaster, and Jacob and I played board games.

Early afternoon Sunday we went to pick up our store bought cake to take to Grandma's and were surprised that is wasn't even close to what we had ordered. We had ordered a basketball themed cake, what they tried to give us was not only the wrong team, but wrong colors, and the wrong size. We have order many cakes from them before and have never had a problem. Needless to say we didn't take the cake.
*The store called me and will be giving us a gift card for their mistake.

Sunday was our birthday celebration with Grandma and Papa, although we did not indulge in any of the birthday cake we did finish off all the cookies we made the day before. It was a really low key celebration, Jordan opened some presents and the boys spent most of the day outside playing (burning off some of their dye induced energy from the cookies). Joey and Jacob preformed a birthday song outside for Jordan with the use of a guitar and some "drums"; Papa helped them construct a stage to preform on. Jordan, Grandma, and I did some shopping and exchanged some of Jordan's birthday shirts. Mostly I spent the day in the basement clearing out some of the stuff the boys and I have been storing there. We ended the day with a bonfire that the boys had split some wood for before heading home.

Clearing out some of our storage has me motivated to tackle the boys rooms and move some furniture around and go through the toy boxes. That's my plan for most of today. Also trying to figure out were we can rake some leaves so we can jump in them, we have mostly pine trees around us.