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First Snow

A couple of weeks ago we had our first flurries:

We were excited, but today we woke up to this:

Nice, huh?


Except that it was a really heavy, wet snow that brought down a lot of branches. My parents had some serious tree fatalities. :(

This afternoon we made this:

Margarita wanted a "traditional" winter snowman-but I finally convinced her that a Halloween snowman would be so much funnier given the date. Poor Pedro's worried his costume's going to be stolen tonight. It's so cold out though, I really doubt it (and if it is, I really hope there's another one at Target).


Here's Juan Carlos "holding" our little Snow Vader.

The funny thing about Colorado is-the snow will all be gone by tomorrow afternoon and the sun will be out. I love it!

Back With My Peeps

I don't know how another two weeks have flown by. Nothing very blog-worthy has happened-just a blur of running from soccer, football, and swimming practices and games. Soccer has come to an end-Juan Carlos had the goal of the season last weekend as he headed the ball into the goal. Poor Pedro had the croup and missed a week of school but is doing better now.

The biggest event of the last two weeks is that I was released as a counselor in the Relief Society (woman's organization) at church and was put back in with the 8 and 9 year old Cub Scouts which is what I did last year from August through December and I loved it. It's grown a little since then-instead of three boys now we have nine.

I'm happy to be back with my den for many reasons:

1) Very few planning meetings
2) Three one-hour den meetings a month-you get a week off every month for pack meeting. We've got three adults-so we're each going to be in charge of ONE den meeting a month (totally manageable)
3) No den meetings over Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break
4) It's a great program with tons of ideas out there for help
5) I get to have fun with Juan Carlos who thinks it's awesome him mom is one of the leaders
6) 8 and 9 year old boys are super easy to please-not a lot of complaining if you put a little effort into your meetings
7) The program, which requires continual record keeping and advancement, fulfills my organizational needs to organize, plan ahead, and keep meticulous records.


This week we went to a local pumpkin patch.

I love my cubs!

Fall, Fall, Fall

Another week has flown by. I would have posted earlier (ummm, sure...), but Margarita has been heavily involved with her science fair project until late every night which involves using my laptop because the "family" computer has a dinosaur version of Word (according to her).

Fall Colors

Last Friday Pedro, Guapo, and I went up to the mountains to check on our lovely house that we no longer are able to use due to soccer games, football games, basketball games, swim meets and such. So we decided to take the afternoon and go just for a couple of hours so we didn't miss the leaves (like last year).

It was beau-ti-ful.

Guapo loves this picture that he took; I think I have lion hair:

Remember Quakey? Yes, we still have him.

Fall Sports

After being drug to his siblings organized sporting events for the last year, Pedro has been looking forward to his chance to shine. I finally gave in and signed him up for "PeeWee Soccer". It was a pretty lame program run by college age girls that were more interested in their iPhones than the cute little 4 and 5 year olds (you can feel the enthusiasm in the photos below). But, finally, in their last two practices, instead of playing freeze tag (a critical element of any serious soccer program), they actually had a little scrimmage.

Pedro rocked!

Look at him going in for this goal-and against 2 goalies nonetheless:

So cute.

Fall Grapes

We have great grapes in our backyard. People far and wide (in our neighborhood) talk about the wonderful grapes they've eaten over the years from our yard. Unfortunately, Guapo trimmed them back so far that we only got like 6 this year (we each got one). Fortunately, our neighbor didn't trim his back and therefore had a bumper crop that he had no interest in harvesting.

Here's Guapo picking them (didn't you know grapes grew on trees?)

Just look at these babies:

This is pretty much all we did last weekend:

We made 5 1/2 gallons of juice that is de-li-cious. I am now making grape jelly from the juice. I tell you, I'm a domestic goddess. And, there are still more grapes out there. (Guapo doesn't know it yet, but he's going back up the ladder when he gets home. I'm not letting them go to waste.)

Fall Obsession

I'm still pretty big into my food storage kick these days. I figure it just makes good sense what with food prices constantly on the rise. I'll have you know that today I took a Sharpie and wrote the expiration date so it would be easily visible on each of my 56 boxes of cereal. And then I alphabetized them.

It made me *so* happy.

I hope you're all enjoying your fall and that you have a great weekend. :)

5 Posts for the Price of 1

I'm still here. Dang blog. Had I been a good little blogger the last few weeks I would have posted no fewer than 5 times! Unfortunately, I'm a not a good little blogger...here they are anyway:

Food Swap

I had a post planned two weeks ago-and it never happened. I was going to show you what my kitchen looks like on Tuesdays:

Pretty bad, huh?

Since January I've been doing a food swap with another family in our ward. I take her family of 6 (with no food allergies) dinner Tuesday night, and she brings us food on Wednesday nights. (It seems a minor miracle to NOT have food allergies here where we live-is it that way everywhere now or is there something wrong here?)

Let's just say Wednesday is awesome and Tuesday kind of sucks.

Having a warm meal delivered to your door is perfectly delightful; coming up with recipes that are new and exciting and worthy to be shared with friends once a week is stressful. Not to mention the preparation and clean up.

That's a lot of dishes!

Preparing homemade baked manicotti for last week's swap gave me an idea for another post...

My Food Processor Finally Comes Out of the Closet (and box)

Long ago, when we lived in Small Town, Mexico, I went through a freezer meal obsession. I purchased a food processor and had it sent to New Orleans where they were supposed to stick it on a boat that was coming down to Small Town. Instead, the new guy in the mail room just sent it down in the mail and we ended up having to pay about twice what I paid for it in customs (grrrr).

I never even opened it up until last week when I was making sauce for the manicotti (ground beef and pepperoni ground up together-interesting).

New things scare me. I remember when I first got an ipod-it sat in a drawer for 6 months before I opened it.

It worked great. Today I made pesto with fresh basil out of my garden. How domestic am I?

On to the next would-be post...

7 Kids=Chaos

My friend had her 4th baby last week. Her 3 other kids, ages 8, 5 and 19 months, came and stayed with us for a couple of nights. These kids are great kids (believe me you, I don't offer to do extended babysitting very often), and I was EXHAUSTED! Like falling asleep on the couch at 9 pm with my clothes on exhausted.

Here are a couple of shots of my house...

Next post...

Pedro, Always the Charmer

I hope this was due to the fact that my friend had her baby last week, but I can't really be certain...

Pedro came up to me the other night and put his hand on my stomach and asked if I had a baby in there because my stomach, according to him, "is big".

Time to lay off on the Blue Bell ice cream.

And last but not least...

Bishop Guapo

Guapo was called to be the new bishop of our ward last Sunday. That makes me a "bishop's wife", which to me conjures up images of someone MUCH older (and slightly nicer) than I am. Oh well. So, I've been spending a lot of time coming to grips with what that means for our family for the next 5 or 6 YEARS. I need to simplify things as much as I can around here in order to remain sane (note to self: this does not mean neglecting my blog).


(For those of you who aren't LDS, our church doesn't have a paid clergy-every position in our congregation is fulfilled by a "regular" person in our 300 member ward. A bishop is the person in charge of the ward and it's kind of like taking on a part-time job in addition to going to his regular job. It will require anywhere from 15-30 hours a week of service. A bishop doesn't have a set "term" but it is normally around 5 years-our last bishop was in for just over 6 years)

He'll do a great job. And don't worry-I'll never again refer to him as Bishop Gaupo on my blog.

He's still just Gaupo to me.

Oozing with Enthusiasm

I didn't mention Juan Carlos (8 yrs) the other day-he has no hair issues at this time (or girl issues, thank goodness).

But, I must say-the child lights up like 100W bulb when he's excited. People always comment on this aspect of his personality (and physiology). It's like his face actually lights up-like one of those glow worm toys. If you know him-you know exactly what I'm talking about. You can't help but smile when you see him like that.

Saturday was his first soccer game. He had fun playing last year and improved a lot-but he never scored during a game. Saturday he was fast, he always seemed to be near the ball, and he SCORED TWO GOALS!

The best part of that was watching him run down the field after he scored with a huge grin on his glowing face (it's also the best part because I didn't get a picture of him scoring an actual goal).

Remember how I said Julio hasn't gotten hurt yet playing football (and I very clearly knocked on wood)? Well, he got a helmet to the knee in the first five minutes of his game on Saturday and sat the game out. He's ok now. It was probably for the best-the smallest kid on the other team was bigger than him (Julio's one of the biggest on his team). A lot of big, tough boys. I was perfectly fine having him on the sideline with a bruise. :)


Fall is crazy-but it's fun watching the kiddos!

My Boys and Their Hair

Hi there! Remember me? That's ok if you don't, I don't blame you. I've been on a relaxing, unannounced blogcation. We're all fine here-I have no excuse besides having 4 active children and not a real good grip on keeping everything and everyone under control.

But, the annoying thing about the blog is that it never stops bothering me. I tried at least 4 or 5 times to declare myself a non-blogger but it never quite takes. So, here I am, for how long-who knows? I could go AWOL again at any moment.

I hope you all had a great summer. Didn't it go fast?

Julio (almost 11) finally wore us down and is now playing tackle football. I spend most of his games flinching as I wait for him to be knocked silly. His team is on the smallish size-so even though he's just under 80 lbs he's the 5th biggest on his team. Because of this, he always has to play on the line against boys that honestly look twice his size. He's remained unscathed so far (knocking on wood...)

But this post is about hair. Julio's got some awesome hair-thick, wavy, dark brown hair that apparently the 5th grade girls love. He came home the first day of school and told me, with a sly little smile on his face, that at one point during the day no fewer than 8 girls surrounded him and asked him to "flip" his hair like Justin Beiber does (which "flip" he has perfected-I've seen him practicing in front of the bathroom mirror).

By the next day it must have gotten old because he came home asking Guapo to take him to get a buzz. The reason? He needed to make himself "less attractive to the girls". Of course when Guapo called his bluff and grabbed the car keys he changed his mind in a jiffy.

Oh how that one's going to give us problems...

Remember Pedro? He's 4 1/2 now if you can believe it. He goes to the same preschool as he did last year-his teacher adores him there. I'm grateful for that everyday because I can see how a person could go either way with him. He's still quite the handful.

Remember his beautiful curly baby hair?

It lasted for quite a while, but recently I had noticed that it was looking pretty nappy. He was finally ready for a big boy cut. :(

Here he is all proud of his new do:

After the cut, he told me, "I like myself like this!"

I'm glad Julio and Pedro don't have self-confidence issues... :)

Have a great weekend. Hopefully I'll be back next week.