Us lately!

I'm playing catch up here:

Travis took treats to celebrate his birthday at school once they started going full days (since his birthday was the day before school started).He wanted to take cupcakes in the worst way, so we bought some from the store and took them over to his class to celebrate. He got to wear a birthday hat, his classmates each drew him a picture for a book, and got a birthday bracelet from his teacher.

What a cute little guy.

Getting ready to enjoy his cupcakes.

 My dad was out of town for part of one week and Christian was out of town for part of the next week, so my mom and I got together and did some crafts to keep ourselves occupied. We spent most of one afternoon working on a pallet sign for Halloween that ended up taking us forever and we still messed up on our chevron stripes! I'm still working on completing it, but we did make this one and the banner to go with it! I love crafting and really get the itch to this time of year!

 

Last Saturday, Christian and I scrimped up enough tomatoes to make a batch of salsa. We used all our hot peppers that we had left and all the ripe tomatoes we had. We got 18 pints total. We are hoping to experiment with a new salsa recipe (that Carson loves) here soon and make another batch.

Don't let that smile fool you! He was actually dripping tears as he chopped up the onions for salsa! When Christian's grandma Asay moved, we were fortunate enough to get her two grinders and used one of them to grind up our peppers and onions! It worked really nice!

 The two older boys went to grandma Asay's one day after school while I was in Billings shopping with my mom. They came home with two catepillars that they found out by the garden. The boys had fun watching them munch on the leaves that they had put in for them and were so excited when one day, one of the catepillars had formed a cocoon. A day later, the other one did too! They are so cool to look at and we are really hoping that they complete their metamorphosis and we gets some moths or butterflies!

The two cocoons. There is one hanging from the lid and the other one from a leaf.

Both cocoons have a gold shimmery stripe found on them!

We joined a dinner club with a bunch of friends and had our first dinner this last Friday. One couple offers to host a group of people at their house and gets to decide on the theme for the night. We were hosted by Jack and Jill Carpenter and our group consisted of Jill and Charlie Marchant and Tianne and Jeff Samson (who didn't come due to having just had a baby) and us. Carpenters planned a Japanese night where they taught us how to make our own sushi! It was really fun to learn how to do! They had avocado, cucumber, green onions, raw tuna, cream cheese, crab and lots of different sauces for us to choose from to make our sushi. I wasn't so sure about trying the raw fish items, but I did and it was actually really good (and we didn't get sick...which Christian was really worried about since he was going to be on a horse all the next day). It was a fun night and I'm looking forward to seeing who will be in our new group next time!

Christian and I's first attempt at making our own sushi.

Jack (on the left) giving us some pointers on making our sushi.