October's Official!

We welcomed October this week! Hooray! Bring on the holidays! It's also about this time of year, at least for the last 7 years, that I start work on compiling and printing our family's "blog book." I do them from Labor Day to Labor Day, and this year's no exception. It's so fun to look back through our old blog posts-- from last Fall 2014 to the end of this Summer 2015. What an amazing, exciting, fun year we had that was just full of changes! I've just finished editing the entries covering our Disney World trip, and man, I've got the Disney itch! One thing I noticed was that although I loved how much time I spend on vacation/travel posts, my favorite posts were just the ordinary, everyday ones, where I got to see what we were up to in our "regular ol' lives."   

In honor of that, here are some fun pics I took of the ordinary, every day stuff from last week! Jon and I took Leah to Chick fil A for lunch one afternoon. We were bored, she was bored, and we all needed a little trip out of the house. She is too cute! 

Zachary is extremely artistic-- he loves to draw and color, and can spend hours working on what he calls his "masterpieces." He made this one for his teacher, who is a Bronco's fan. I love his little football players! He is great at to add details. I need to post more of his work. 

Since last month Jon and I visited Zach at lunch, it was only fair to visit Lucy as soon as I could! I didn't tell her beforehand, so she was super surprised when I showed up waiting in front of her cafeteria door! I love this 3rd grader!

They did a letter writing unit in school, and this is what we got in the mail: "Dear Mom and Dad, Thank you for cheering me up when I was crying because I missed Josh and Luke. I am so thankful that you are my Mom and Dad. You have been very comforting and special to me. I love you very much even when I'm mad! I appreciate you especially when you give great and wonderful things for my birthday. You're brilliant in every way. Yours Truly, Lucy" 

I'll take a letter like that ANY day!

For General Conference weekend, Lucy got to spend the night Saturday night at cousin Sophie's house. She was thrilled!! Jon went to the Priesthood session, so I took Zach on a date (with Leah too, of course) to dinner. He picked Kneaders, which is also what Lucy had picked the Saturday before incidentally, but I didn't mind because it's close and we love their food. He was thrilled to get this Halloween cookie as his treat!

We went home and watched a Halloween movie together, and then I made an overnight pumpkin french toast bake-- that turned out more like a bread pudding. We put it in the oven Sunday morning before Conference and had a delicious fall breakfast in no time! 

This goofy kid loved it, and his hot chocolate!

We listened to the awesome messages of Conference, and worked on this Christmas pendant banner for the piano.

And Lucy and Zach made this cute felt Halloween banner for our counter. They did awesome!

That night after Conference we invited Jeremy and Kylene's family over for dinner, which happened to be an Oktoberfest feast! I pulled out my old wiener schnitzel recipe from my rusty bag of Study Abroad tricks (Jon swears I haven't made it since we were dating back in 2004-- and he's probably right), whipped up some German potato salad, a Greek salad (that's European, right?), threw in some pretzel rolls, and we had ourselves a meal to remember!  

My kids loved their first wiener schnitzel! But really, who doesn't love a deep fried piece of pork?? 

Miss Leah, waiting for her dinner!

I even baked up a Sachertorte for dessert. It's an old cake (like the recipe dates back to the 1700's-- made by a 16 year old baker's apprentice to impress the King, or so the story goes) that you can really only find in Vienna. It's a bittersweet chocolate cake with an apricot glaze in between layers, and then a dark chocolate ganache on top. Traditionally it's  served with fresh unsweetened whipped cream on top. We used to buy a piece before heading home late at night after attending the opera, because the Hotel Sacher is right across the street from the Opera House. The taste brought back lots of fun memories. Maybe we'll just have to make our impromptu Oktoberfest a tradition!