Pre-Halloween Festivities!

Well, we've been doing lots of fun Halloweenie stuff lately so I thought I'd post a few fun pics since I've got the time:)

Wednesday we visited the witches at Gardner Village. Every year they set out tons of fun witches and encourage kids to come and do a scavenger "Witch Hunt". After you find all the witches they give you a chocolate chip cookie. It's pretty fun. Everyone's all-time favorite is "Witchy-poo" which is a witch sitting in an out house reading the newspaper taking care of her business... The boys always get a big kick out of her...

Then last Thursday night I took the boys up to Red Butte Garden for the opening night of Garden After Dark. It was BEAUTIFUL!! Seriously!! I LOVE Red Butte all year long, but I don't know if I've ever seen in more beautiful than with all the fall leaves! They had fun activities for the kids... they got to paint pumpkins and that sort of thing, but my favorite was the broom-making activity. They used dried grassed and sticks from around the garden and tied them together into brooms... then they had broom-stick races where they won ribbons to decorate their broom. What a genius idea for re-using your dried grasses as you're winterizing your yard! Genius I tell you!


Okay, then Friday was the kids' annual school Halloween carnival. It's always a great time! There are kid's activities all over the school and it's the one time they get to wear their costume's to school (their principal has a real thing about safety and he doesn't permit costumes or a parade on Halloween... it sucks, but we deal because it's a great school!). We were all rock stars. It's important to notice my sleeve tattoo's and nose piercing:) It think I should dress like that every time I go volunteer at the school... it was normal enough that folks didn't really notice I was dressed up, but different enough that people kept giving me double looks as if they had to remind themselves that it was Halloween and I was dressed up. Too funny! I'll post more pics of the kids in their cute costumes later...

Saturday we had a Little Gym carnival, but it was such a mad house I didn't take photos. I am afraid my boys have outgrown Little Gym... It's time, yet again, to close a chapter and move on to the next one... But that's another story:) Back to Halloween...


Then Sunday my good friend Rachel held her annual Halloween festivities. She called it "Owl-impics" and she had us running an obstacle course throughout her neighborhood dressed like this (Jeff & I went for the old stand-by costumes of "Hippies", Drew was a rockstar and Will was Indiana Jones)... It was a beautiful day and we had a great time, as usual. I love her parties because I don't have to plan or do anything. It's so unlike my life, that I relish in it!

So that brings us up to now. Just 3 days til the big day and I'm almost all Halloweened out... nah, that would never happen! I love Halloween!! Hope you are all enjoying the season! I can't wait to see all your pics of you and your families in your costumes!

Our Four Corners Vacation

Now that we've been home for a week, I've decided it's time to update the blog about our fun and educational vacation! The boys have been off-track (the joys of year-round school) so we borrowed Glen & Judy's trailer and headed out for two weeks exploring the Colorado Plateau and the 4 Corner States (Utah, Colorado, Arizona & New Mexico). It was a blast!! I spent all last week creating the equivalent of a text book of our adventure, so in this blog I'm going to try to be brief...


In Arizona we went to the Grand Canyon and Petrified National Park. It was beautiful! I can't believe I've lived so close to the Grand Canyon my whole life and never went there! It was truly a sight to behold! The whole concept of time and creation is so much more perplexing to me now!


In New Mexico we went to the International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta. It was amazing watching 600 balloons from all over the world fill the skies! Jeff got to work on the "Chase Crew" and help put up a balloon. We also toured Old Town and did a drive by past Jeff's old house and elementary school while we were in Albuquerque.


In Colorado we visited Colorado National Monument and Mesa Verde National Park. The boys liked climbing around in the cliff dwellings and Drew especially loved learning about the native people who used to live here.


In Utah we went to Arches National Park, went rafting down the Colorado River and hiked all through Zion National Park. In all, we visited six National Parks and the boys earned their Jr. Ranger badges at each one.

I don't know if it needs to be stated, but if you didn't already know, I am a total nerd and I proved it over and over on this trip. First of all, I checked out stacks of books from the library in preparation for this trip... everything from drawing books to history books to Native American legends. And I dumped all this knowledge into my children. We read so many books and watched so many movies about these places before we left, that they were as excited to go visit all these places as they would have been to go to LegoLand! They were dressing up and acting out scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for days before we actually went to the places it was filmed.

Then on the trip I'd read books about the places we were witnessing and people who lived here so that they already knew much of what they were learning in their Jr. Ranger booklets before we even got them. They were prepared!

And then, I brought each of us a pizza box and lots of colorful modeling clay so that we could each create a diorama of our adventures and bring it home as a souvenir. It was fun deciding what clay creation we wanted to make to represent each of the places we visited. They turned out really cool and it was a fun family activity for all our "trailer time".

So this wasn't just a vacation, it was a learning adventure! Because that's just the kind of nerd I am! Thankfully, my kids don't mind that I'm always trying to teach them things... at least not yet:)

Overall it was an awesome vacation and if you ever get the chance, you can read in more detail about each of our adventures in the digital scrapbook (aka text book) I mentioned at the beginning of the blog.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Plain City!

We just returned from a "Great Pumpkin" party at my cousin Geana's house in Plain City, Utah and it was such a blast! I am blessed with some of the coolest cousins a person could ever hope for! Geana and I used to do bi-weekly playdates with our kids when they were younger and for one of said playdates we went to a you-pick pumpkin patch here in Riverton. After we left the patch, Geana had the brilliant idea of creating her own you-pick pumpkin patch in her backyard. Well, year's later, her pumpkin patch is thriving and I'm so proud of her ingenuity! She decided she wanted to do something big this year for opening night so as we were all bouncing around ideas together up at our cabin I suggested she show the movie "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" and have someone dress up in my pumpkin costume to give out goodies to the kiddos afterwards. To my surprise, none of my Plain City relatives were very familiar with this Peanuts classic! Still, Geana went with it and made it into such a fun evening for her family and friends.

This is Geana, one of my most favorite people on this earth. I love her like a sister!

And here's us having a great time at the party! We each got to pick and cut our own pumpkin. This is Drew (side note: we'd just watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidd so he was dressed up like Sundance... but that's a story for a later blog.)

Here's my pumpkin. I chose a GIGANTIC one, but later decided that I probably won't actually carve it, so I got a smaller one too. But seriously, check out how big this thing is!!

Here's Will with his perfect pumpkin. He chose an ideally sized one! He already knows how he's going to carve it. He was telling me about it and then said "I saw the idea in Family Fun magazine." It's so funny how his little phrases sound like echoes of myself talking. Because that's pretty much where I get all my ideas too!

Jeff decided to go for the yellow pumpkin. He always comes up with the most clever ideas when it comes time to carve... it will be interesting what he comes up with for this one. Stay tuned... I'm sure I'll blog about it.

After we picked our pumpkins, we sat around the bonfire and roasted marshmallows for s'mores and then....

Sat back and enjoyed the movie on the lawn. It was perfect weather and the hot cocoa (that was "sipping hot") and donuts were the perfect touch!

After the movie, my cute cousin Kiley (whom I also love like a sister) dressed up as the Great Pumpkin and came bounding out of the pumpkin patch to surprise the kids with goodies. She was so stinkin' cute!!

All the kids rushed up to her for candy.

Then afterward we all took turns posing for photos with her. I just can't say enough how cool I think this whole night turned out to be. Geana is amazing! And Kiley is such a good sport! I love her energy and contagious smile!

Thanks guys for making this such a fun and memorable night for my family and for all the other fortunate folks who came! I love you guys!!

Happy Harvest!

I decided that in honor of this fine Fall weather, I should do a blog about all the wonderful harvesting we've been doing this year! Recently, we had a feast of all the yummy things we've been making... Each is being marketed under the name "Bergstrom's Best" as affectionately named by Drew. Witness Bergstrom's Best Applesauce, pickles and peach jam! Each was a labor of love and each has it's own special little story...

It all started with the pickles. The boys and I found canning cucumbers at the South Jordan Farmer's Market and decided we should give pickling a try. It was surprisingly simple!! Will and I did it one afternoon in all of about 30 minutes!



Another find from said farmer's market was popcorn! We actually popped it right on the cob! We just stuck the cobs in a brown paper bag and microwaved it for about 5 minutes, and VOILA! Popcorn on the cob! We all thought it was pretty dang cool!

Next came the peaches... meet Will, the original "Peach Thief"! Our backyard neighbors have a peach tree that BARELY reaches into our yard, and Will could not WAIT for them to be ripe enough for him to pick!

Here he is in action... he pushes a lawn chair up to the fence and tip-toes on top of the chair as he reaches his little arm over the fence to grab a peach. He often would stack trucks or tractors on the chair to get him an even better reach. It was too funny!

At lunchtime whenever I asked him what fruit he wanted, he would just say he'd take care of it and then run outside and pick himself a peach!

Well, after all this thievery, imagine my happiness when one of my WW members brought me a HUGE bag of peaches fresh from her tree! I told her about my stealing son and rushed home to share the abundance with Will. We decided to make peach jam with all the peaches and went straight to work. We made a TON of jam and Will was a big help. He'd cut up the peaches after Jeff and I peeled and pitted them. We had peaches all over our kitchen! Well, lunchtime happened in the midst of our jam making and guess what my sweet Will did? He went outside and stole a peach off the neighbors tree!! I said, "Will! Why did you take it off their tree when we have a kitchen full of peaches right here?" And he just shrugged. I decided he just liked the freedom of picking his own peaches!

So it was no surprise that both boys were ELATED when I told them we were going to head to Wasatch Mountain State Park in Midway, Utah to go apple picking! Something about picking your own fruit is just an exciting thing for a kid.

The folks at the park were super nice and they let us each have our own apple picking tool. It was like a rake with a basket attached, so we'd stick the long stick as far as we could up in the tree until we had an apple in the teeth of the rake part, then we'd just yank it down and ta da! There would be an apple in the basket part. It was so fun! This is us with our apple picking tools.

Here are the fruits of our labors. Beautiful little "Heirloom" apples. We picked 10 pounds of them off 100 year old trees. Very cool! They were pretty little apples, but they were no good for just eating. They were way too sour!

So Jeff and I turned the sour apples into applesauce (the best applesauce I've ever tasted!)! We did our first batch by hand with regular old kitchen tools, but it was way too much work and we couldn't imagine having to do it with all 10 pounds of apples! Thankfully, my friend lent us her fancy-dancy Pampered Chef apple-peeler-corer-slicer tool and we were able to make 3 times as much applesauce in half the time! (Thanks Tracee!)

So that's how happily we've enjoyed this harvest. I don't know if you remember last year around this time, but I blogged on here about what a failure I am at gardening... Well, this year, I took a different route and decided to rely on the gardening skills of others instead, and I have to say that this year's harvesting experience has been MUCH MUCH happier!!