Week in Review

Sometimes I feel like a bad mom because I'm ornery and let my kids watch more movies than they should. Like yesterday, and probably today. It wasn't even 8am before I had my first breakdown. Yikes...could be a long one.
Other times I feel like a great mom, like in all these pictures! Which is why I choose to post these!
Miles and I went on our first date the other day! It was totally impromptu one Friday night. Sometimes it's really nice living in the middle of town. We just walked a few blocks up the road to a frozen yogurt place and used a buy one get one free coupon. I swear, this is the only decent picture out of 10 or so I took.

Gwen's trying out a new face these days. Miles started pulling faces at this same age. It's fun to see such a personality start to emerge.


We had a fun dinner the other night with some friends of ours who have twin boys who are a year old. It still cracks me up that Gwen is about the same size.

We went to our ward Halloween party the other night. Miles was having a blast until some kid showed up in a scary mask. Then he stuck close to mommy! Gwen is learning how to wave! We got Gwen's costume from my sister-in-law (Thank you again!!) so we decided to make Miles a spider to go along with some sort of bug theme. I took the easy way out again and just bought him black pants and a black shirt and hot glued sections of backer rod shaped like spider legs to the back of his shirt. It took about 10 minutes, no sewing required and was super cheap. My kind of costume. This is the first year Miles has actually liked wearing a costume. It's pretty fun.



I managed to squeeze some actual quality time in yesterday between the movie watching and laying on the floor. :) We played with the leaves outside and both kids loved it! I wish I would have gotten more pictures.


When Richie came home, who had also had a hard day, we decided to throw caution to the wind and head out to a straw maze. Never mind that it was a week day or that it was almost dark outside, or that it was 40 degrees at best. It was the best part of the entire day, probably week! Last year we went to a straw maze when I was pregnant with Gwen and Miles didn't really like it. This year Miles thought it was awesome!! We gave him a flash light and he led us around the maze for a good 30 minutes. Whenever he came upon a dead end, he would stop running and shout, "Oh No! Deh Eh!! Quick, Dis Way!! C'mon Mommy, Daddy, Bay Gwe!"

Family Pictures Fall 2011

When Richie's brother Ross came home from his mission earlier this year, his aunt took some special family pictures of the whole Garner clan. So why would we get more family pictures already then?? I came up with 3 reasons to justify getting them taken.
1.Fall is magical time of year! It's when Richie and I met and fell in love. I love Fall! I had this vision of our pictures involving a big red, yellow and orange leaf pile, but Rexburg had other plans.
2.Gwen is no longer a little blob of a baby. She can sit up and smile on command...ish. She's just changed SO much in such a short amount of time.
3.I lost all the baby weight! Shout out! I did it 6 months faster this time around (thank goodness) but I still need to lose more in order for my clothes to fit me "normally". I use the term normal loosely because I think I've resigned myself to the fact that my body will never be "normal" again. *sigh*

So we contacted my old friend Kelly who took our pictures last time around. Remember this shoot?


She gave us a killer deal again. If you need some pictures done you should check out her photo blog and contact her! kellyspencephotography.blogspot.com We took our pictures on Saturday and by Tuesday we had 3 discs of edited pictures mailed to us. Amazing right? She was so patient with our kids. It was the perfect storm on Saturday. Gwen got sick with the flu and Miles decided not to nap. So you can imagine they were fairly difficult. But she managed to get some really fun ones. There are lots of pictures on this post, I just couldn't decide, so many turned out awesome!

We lived in Sugar City for 2 years and never got pictures there to document that time in our lives, so we went back out to the road that we lived on and took some pictures at the Drive in Movie place and a cool red barn down the road.









I made some carmel apples the night before to reveal while we were taking pictures because I thought we'd get some fun reactions out of Miles. He wasn't quite as animated about them as I was hoping, but still pretty fun.








These next three are some of my favorite! Can't wait to get these up in the kids room.







Then we shot a few at Porter Park across from our apartment to document where we live now!

Hotel Garner

We had a few house guests this past weekend! Richie's cousin Branson, his wife Kate and their 2 kids who are the same age as ours spent a little time with us! They were coming up to visit other family and needed a place to crash for a night and although it was a short visit, we has a good time. Here are a few pictures.

Don't let her size fool you, Gwen is only 2 months older than their little gal, not 6 months older. :)



We made spider cupcakes! oooh Spooky!



Earlier today we made spiders out of some pipe cleaners I had laying around. Miles thought those were pretty cool.




And just because she's cute...



We'd be happy to have more guests at hotel Garner!! There's your written invitation. No more excuses. Come on up!

Our Shelves Runneth Over

As a matter of fact, so does the underneath of our bed too! As of yesterday, October 3rd 2011, at approximately 11:37 am, I finished the canning for this year! For the past few years, I've set a goal to learn to can something new every year. Well, I think I learned how to can about 10 new things this year. We put up pesto, peas, green beans, bread and butter pickles, broccoli, corn, relish, dill pickles, applesauce, apple juice, diced tomatoes, carrots, peaches, pears, pear jam, pear butter, apple pie filling and pear sauce. We also dried a fair amount of pears and apples and made enough frozen baby food to last until Gwen won't be eating baby food anymore! It has been one of those months where we're reminded how intimately involved Heavenly Father is in our lives. We'd get done canning and then a neighbor would offer the apples of their tree (all of our apple stuff was free FYI because of such generous neighbors). Or someone would offer us their extra pears, or bring over some canned goods that they weren't using. It was a pretty cool experience. And it's always nice to know that if the world ends tomorrow, everyone can come on over to the Garners and we'll eat applesauce and pickles. :)

We had a great time watching conference this past weekend. It's always a challenge with young kids, I'm learning, but they both did pretty darn well. Even during the Saturday morning session that we spent at a neighbors house. There's an old widdower down the street who invited us over to watch the first session, so I was nervous about them behaving, but it turned out really well. We also kept busy and awake by tying a quilt and making "special conference pudding", which is just code for pudding we made during conference to keep Miles busy. I'm already excited for the Conference Ensign to come out so that I can get more out of it!