Dueck's Roost

Someday I will be one of those moms who home makes each of her children's unique and absolutely fantastic Halloween costumes--and no later than a month before Halloween. Or hey, maybe not. But regardless, this is certainly not that day! Especially considering I can hardly sew. This year for Halloween costumes, the kids and I headed over to a thrift store (after a day of autumn yard work), where I told the kids they could each have up to 5$ to spend on costume items. I explained that they were welcome to look on the rack of actual costumes but my recommendation would be to use a little creativity and scour the entire store. So they did, and it was a lot of fun! Obviously this picture does not show the results of our outing. It does however represent our traditional family night pumpkin carving activity. This year our pumpkins were spooky green (thanks to Kevin's great friend at work ... actually thanks to friend's garden). Here we are all together in costume, geared up for o...

Oh, General Conference weekend, how we love you! There is nothing like hanging out as a family and listening to wonderful, inspired talks from men and women (including the prophet of God and his Apostles on the earth today) who live their lives so in line with the Savior and His teachings. Individuals who love freely and are in the constant service of others--and inspire the rest of us to try and do the same. Of course all the delicious food at g-ma/g-pa's house doesn't hurt either, but that's just an added bonus;). Here we are together (straight out of bed from the looks of it ... which is probably why I"m not in any of the pictures:). Mae and Brooks working on Conference activity books. Gotta love the Internet (and in this case, Sugardoodle .net in particular) for all the fun and free printables . Just love my family!! And an "action" shot of President Uchtdorf . Thank you ipad for allowing us to watch on the big screen. Huddling around the computer in th...

Okay, so in our family we don't have friend b-day parties every year. The official rule is every other year, but even then, we try to make it somewhat enticing to opt for some kind of alternative. Awful, I know. We got to realizing this year, though, that Porter had not had an actual "party" since he was five. It was a monster pool party (because the two things go together so well), during our Houston days when late September was still crazy hot! Needless to say, we decided the awesome (I will not go into just how awesome, since I did that in my previous post) 10-year-old needed a party! Turns out, I had a couple of really amazing epiphanies through planning and actually experiencing the big event;). First... 10-year-old boy parties aren't really parties at all, they're just super cool and laid back hang out sessions! Yep. Fun times when boys see who can eat the most pizza, attempt to play wall ball in the upstairs game room, and finish off a package of football-...