Party!

We went up to Idaho for little Eli's first birthday party and saw Steve and Alisha's beautiful home that they've been renting and a model home by the builder that is building their new home. They also took us to the lot where they were planning to build. It's a beautiful area and you can get a lot more house for your money there than you can in the Ogden area. Here are some pictures of the party.

Alisha made a very fun (and yummy) cake for Eli.Cadence loved the cake.


Eli didn't like the clapping at the end of "Happy Birthday".
Eli wearing one of his many fun gifts.


The proud grandma's.

Halloween -it's time to catch up

So I thought it would be nice to start catching up on the blog before we hit the 6 month mark as it's only been about 5 months since Halloween.

Getting ready to go to the trunk or treat put on by some local businesses (we had a family Halloween party the night of the ward trunk-or-treat).

At the trunk-or-treat, which turned out to be quite disappointing, the lines were ginormous and most of the trunks were lame with treats to match. But our little Belle looked adorable. Aunt Holly came along and we had a good time.

On Halloween day we went to some local grocery stores (Macey's, Lee's Market, and Wansgards) for some indoor trick-or-treating. It was a little rainy so it was nice that it was all indoors. Lee's gave great treats like string cheese, gossners chocolate milk, a little bag of carrot sticks, and other fun treats and prizes, they were my favorite, Macey's was good too, they let us decorate a pumpkin cookie, Wansgards was alright, they didn't get too into it. . . Aunt Kaylee came along and we had a very fun day.

This was taken a little while before Halloween but Cadence is wearing her Halloween shirt so I thought it was fitting. She was playing peek-a-boo in the clothes. Here she has just emerged from throwing herself back into the clothes so all you could see were her little legs and feet. It was very cute!

The annual (Giatras) Halloween party

First, here I am doing Heather's hair for her Medusa costume (which I purchased second-hand for $5).

Medusa's shadow, watch out, if you look directly into her eyes, you'll turn to stone.

Sean and I as secret agents.

Our costumes didn't correlate with Cadence's at all but we did what we could. (I just have to brag, because I'm a bargain shopper, our trench coats were literally a steal from a yard sale, they were giving everything away for free at the end and we grabbed them.)

The traditional doughnut eating contest, we never remember who won, the fun part is just playing.

Carving pumpkins.
Enjoying our delicious Chinese dinner. This year Jon and Stacey shook things up by putting the chinese names for each course on the menu so there was no figuring out what we were ordering. The meal was great and all homemade (sweet and sour chicken, eggrolls, wontons, the works). We had the whole party in the garage, they brought out a big rug and a couch and we decorated the place to look like Halloween party central. The Giatras' really know how to throw a party.

3 cute cousins.

Mom and Dad's cute costumes.

Grandpa with two of his beautiful (sleepy) granddaughters.

Great Grandma and Grandpa Sjoblom couldn't get enough of Abby.

Halloween night we ended up throwing a little impromptu party with a jack-o-lantern pizza and some fun games and treats, it was a lot of fun. The second one isn't a quality picture, but it's the best I had with everyone looking.

Ceiling stamping, painting fun

We've been kind of taking a break on house projects for a while. My brother Brady got home from his mission recently and offered to come help stamp our ceiling with the texture that we've already done in a few rooms of the house so we took him up on the offer and got back to work. Here are some before, in the process, and after pictures.







Everything got super dusty< but we got it all cleaned up and put back together.
We bought a ceiling fan to match the one in the front room and a pendant light to put over the sink. We do miss the awesome globe light that was over the sink before but I think it's about time that one went to it's grave. We are very happy with the results, now we just need to sand and paint the ceiling in Cadence's room.