13 Days of Halloween

David was really excited for Halloween this year.  My sister Kelly told me about her Halloween craft night with a couple of girls and I caught an idea from Studio 5 for a Halloween advent.  I didn't get my act together early enough to make a full month advent so we did the 13 Days of Halloween.  We started on October 19th with decorating the house with our current Halloween decorations.

Over the course of our 13 days we made: pumpkin bats which I called bat-o-lanterns, salt dough ghosts with brown paper bag trees, foam Halloween picture cards, we played Halloween tic-tac-toe (from My Computer is My Canvas it was a free printable), we went to the pumpkin patch, carved pumpkins, went to Halloween parties, we collected and read Halloween stories, worked on our costumes, and some other things.  It was a fun time and just a little something for me to do with David one on one while Matthew napped in the afternoons.  Most afternoons a couple of neighbor kids would join us and it was great fun.

I will totally do this activity again with David & Matthew next year.  Maybe I will even splurge and go for the full 31 days of the month.  I keep thinking of things that would be good for next year so we'll see what happens.  Maybe I'll just leave it at 13 days and change out the activities every year.  Most of our crafts from this year came from Family Fun.  I might even change the way our 13 days is displayed.  I don't know.  I now have a whole year to work things out again.

Date Night: The Pledge

Despite my/our best efforts Dustin and I haven't been that great at dating.  I became aware of the blog Simply Modern Mom through another blog I follow and I fell in love.  At the beginning of 2010 she and her husband began their Project 52: Date Nights.  I loved how they made a contract with each other, both signing the document and setting the rules for the dates they would have each week.  Now Dustin and I have had a date every week for the past 4 weeks but I haven't linked up with her on Tuesdays yet, maybe someday.  The point is that we are getting started.  So far so good.

I didn't get a picture of our contract, just know that it was downloaded from Simply Modern Mom, signed by both of us and a few rules added.  One of the rules we added is that both computers are to remain off unless use of the computer is important for the date.

I'm excited to see what this will do for our relationship.  I'm excited to see what creative things we come up with to do for dates.  Our dates need to be as free as possible, so they will almost always be at home except for a few instances which will be posted here shortly.

I would encourage any of you to join the project and link up at Simply Modern Mom or not.  I will post our dates here because I know you are all dying to know what Dustin and I will do to date eachother.

Captain Moroni & the Title of Liberty

At the beginning of this month we were privileged to watch General Conference in our living room.  I love being able to watch conference at home because it affords Dustin & I the time to watch, David to learn that there are sessions for 2 days - that he can watch with us or play in his room, and keeps Matthew on his schedule.  Mostly I really love the conference talks they are always so great - uplifting, educational, inspiring to do better and bring a wonderful spirit into our home.

This fall while listening I kept hearing these phrases that really resonated with me and really made me want to include them in our home.  Sunday morning I realized that these phrases reminded me a lot of Captain Moroni & the Title of Liberty (it's verses 10-37 if your curious)  I thought that these phrases would make a great Title of Liberty.

For Family Home Evening (FHE) the Monday after conference our lesson was about Captain Moroni & the Title of Liberty.  We started our family title of liberty but just plain got distracted.  I was very disappointed and had really wanted to make this a family affair instead of doing it all on my own.  The next Monday was our ward FHE so the following week when I asked Dustin what we should do for FHE he suggested we do the Title of Liberty lesson/activity again.  This was a great way for us to review the story with David and work on our title of liberty.  I shared some phrases that I really loved and wanted to include, David shared what he thought we should add - which really was in line with what we wanted the activity to be, Dustin shared some of this thoughts.  I spent a couple of days organizing our ideas and forming them into a flowing piece that we could display.

This past week while getting various art supplies for our 13 days of Halloween (more to follow on this) I found that the artist canvases were on sale for half off!  I grabbed one roughly the size we were wanting, it's a little skinnier, some spray paint that would coordinated with our upstairs and downstairs rooms and the adhesive vinyl.  I now had all of the supplies and just needed to pull out my cricut to get all those letters cut out!  With the cricut out and a few sample letters left over from another project I decided that I could just do a mock up.  Dustin pulled out his laptop with fancy programs and we did our initial mock up on the computer.  I have to say that I am really excited about this piece.  It will be a great piece of artwork in our home!

Here is the initial mock up

I still plan on cutting the letters out on paper and configuring them on the canvas.  Hopefully by next Sunday I can post the actual Hinton Family Title of Liberty displayed on the wall.

It's a bird, It's a bear...

...no it's David in a tree.
The other day I am taking care of the laundry, upstairs in my room because from there I can see and/or hear David playing outside.  I stop for a moment because I can hear him talking to our little neighbor girl, Brianna, but I don't see David anywhere!  I go outside to investigate further only to still hear him but not see him.  It's not until I had been outside for a few minutes that I realize David is up in the tree.  Not only is he in the tree, he is about 3/4 of the way up the tree which is about as tall as the building is sits infront of.  I couldn't believe that little monkey!