Boo

So here is a fitting topic for the season. We live in a haunted house...It doesn't bother me because there is nothing bad about it but I wish their pets would hang out somewhere else. Princess 2 has been very concerned about the puppy in the corner of her room. Sometimes she wakes us up crying about it at night but more interestingly, she has several times been in her room during the day and she will seriously freak out. Whenever this happens she will point to the same corner and say "A-Puppy!". She reacts the exact same way whenever she sees any dog approaching her in public. She does not like dogs (alive or otherwise) unless they are in books. Here is the clincher to our little pet cemetery room...Once I was picking up their room and would have sworn I could smell a dog...No real problem but we just changed the carpet and I hate cleaning up ectoplasm.

Friday night was the Trunk-or-Treat party at the church. In our classical good parenting style we played with face paint so long we didn't have time for dinner prior to gorging ourselves on candy, doughnuts, and apple cider there. Afterwards we decided to hit the other food group of fats and oils at Arby's. The mouse was not part of the dollar menu.

Every week on Sunday we have a sacred solemn assembly as a family and make our menu plan for the next week. Last week after looking up a bunch of copy cat recipes for Olive Garden dishes we decided to tackle 2 of my favorites. I think this caused a local shortage of butter and cream in the local supermarket but I would call both attempts huge successes. It took us about the same amount of time to make these dishes as it would to get a table on a Friday night and we made them for about the same as it costs to tip the waiter. Some days I would still pay for it just so I wouldn't need to do the dishes afterwards.

Chicken Gnocchi Soup

Chicken Carbonara

I found a new way to "motivate" the children. The ability to turn into a "Daddy Monster" when the kids are being bad has always existed but augmenting their imaginations with a mask brings a whole new level to the physiological damage I can cause. All I need to do is don on the latex personification of how I am feeling and sneak up to them when I hear them fighting down stairs, or playing when they have been assigned a task. Works better than anything else I have found yet for Thing II and it's a bunch more fun.... for me!

Scariest thing...the color of our bathroom walls.

The baby started laughing this week.We need to catch it on film sometime. It's contagious.