FUN weekend

We had a really fun weekend! Friday night Landon and I intended to go to Stockman's for a yummy steak dinner with some of his birthday money, but at the last minute just kept driving to Idaho Falls and ate at Five Guys for less than half the price. I LOVE Five Guys! After dinner, we went to Ross and just looked around, which was really fun minus kids. Landon ended up buying a new pair of summer sandals (leather Clark-brand sandals in size 14 for only $20!) and a new pair of sunglasses. (In case some people don't know, Landon loses sunglasses on a regular basis...it's kind of a family joke. He's not allowed to spend more than $5-7 on a pair of sunglasses anymore, so he got more bang for his buck at Ross.)

After Ross, we headed back to Rexburg to see The Other Guys, a movie with Will Ferrell that we'd been wanting to see. It was our kind of movie and we laughed so hard we cried and had college kids turning around to look at us. (You know what? They're so freaking annoying 99% of the time, that I'm glad we laughed loud enough to annoy them.) We got home around 11:30 and our little girls were sound asleep in our bed. We are in SUCH a good time in our lives right now! We bought them a set of 6 nail polishes from Ross as their payment for being good kids while we were gone.

Saturday morning we had our family pictures re-taken, which I just went to look at this morning. They're way better. I can't wait until they're ready to post/print/give away.

Saturday afternoon the girls were told to put their pumpkins in the dumpster, but they decided to get destructive and smash the crap out of them first. I suggested getting hammers and beating them as hard as they could. My girls don't play as hard as boys or choose to get dirty very often, so as long as they clean up the mess, why not??

Landon and I spent Saturday cooking! We had invited the Bates family over for homemade pizza on Sunday, so we did all the prep work Saturday. We wanted them to have a good experience, so we made Christina's BBQ chicken pizza that is in our 2nd family cookbook. We made the BBQ sauce, caramelized onions, chicken, and the pizza dough. Landon found a recipe for homemade mozzarella cheese, so we made that too! It turned out great! The recipe is basically a gallon of milk (we used 2%), a half tablet of Junket Rennet dessert tablets (found in the pudding section...the same company that makes Danish Dessert) and some citric acid (found in bulk in the health food section of our grocery store). The recipe is in the Junket tablet box, but also online and it's called American Mozzarella cheese. One gallon of milk made 3 1-cup balls of cheese. It melts and tastes just like normal cheese, in my opinion. It was a fun thing to try.

Saturday night we went to Dancing with The Stars, the Rexburg version. Emma's math teacher was one of the stars and he won! There were 6 "stars" and they were paired up with senior students of Emma's ballroom dance company, IBA. The event was a fundraiser for the new high school's grand piano and marquee that they're trying to buy. We drug Landon to it, but he actually really enjoyed himself. We were able to see several ballroom dance performances from the IBA as well as cheer on different community members as they competed as the "stars." It is so much fun to live in a community where we know so many people and where they have wholesome, fun, family recreation activities. It was a really positive experience for us.

Sunday we had the Bates family over for homemade pizza! The pizza was tasty, and Jenny brought over the best dessert! It was Apple/Cranberry pie. She got it from Family Fun magazine, so if you want to make it, look for it online. It was really yummy. The Bates have 3 kids and Emma and Lauren get along with all of them really well, so the kids played Judge Judy/detective/spies together upstairs, while the adults played a fun TV trivia game on DVD. It is so hard to find adults who know as much about TV as we do, and the Bates actually almost beat us! We pulled out the victory on the last question, otherwise we would have been toast.

Such a fun weekend!!!