This past weekend we got together with Sam's entire family-all 17 of us. Sam's brother, Justin lives in Hawaii with his wife Leah. They were in town so we all got together.

Saturday we all went to the zoo. The weather was perfect and it was a wonderful activity when the group included 7 kids age 8 months-8 years.

After the zoo we went to Sam's other brother, George's house for dinner and to celebrate Leah's birthday. Sunday we got together again to hang out and eat Mexican food. It was a fun weekend.

Trick or Treat

We invited several families over for dinner and trick or treating. It was a lot of fun to get to know some neighborhood and school friends better.

Our first trick or treaters were Hannah (Princess Belle) and Ella. They joined us as we all went trick or treating down the street. Tonight Katherine and Caroline chose to be "Fancy Nancy" and Snow White.

Aren't these 3 of the cutest girls you have ever seen? Katherine as Fancy Nancy, Phoebe as a ballerina and Hannah as a princess.

We love our next door neighbor Ms. Betty (even if they do have a longhorn flag). She loved seeing all of the kids in costume.


I made Katherine and Caroline their treat bags.

Caroline inspects her loot.
Here is our pumpkin doing his job for the night.
Katherine and Caroline love the pumpkin.
Katherine had to inspect her loot. We were going to have her trade it in for a big treat but never got around to it. She asked for a piece of candy that night and the next day and then forgot about it.
We had a great evening trick or treating down our street. We are lucky to live on a street where there are tons of kids and it is really a fun night. It was our first year to trick or treat so I was not really anticipating the bigger kids that were wearing scary costumes. I think that Katherine handled it all well and we tried to talk about it when we got home. She would shine her flashlight and say, "it's just pretend."

Diet

For the past 3 weeks Sam and I have been eating a very strict diet. We have been calling it a cleanse but that has been confusing people. It is really considered more of a "purification". I read about the cleanse on my chiropractor's blog and thought it was something I would benefit from. Then I started working on convincing Sam to join me on the cleanse. I knew this would be hard for him and was actually surprised at how quickly he agreed.

So, what was our cleanse diet? The way it is designed is that for the first 10 days you only have fruits and vegetables along with some supplements and protein shakes. Then the next 11 days you can add to that lean, organic meat, eggs and brown rice. Since I am still nursing Caroline I was to start on the second half of the program. Sam also started on the second half because that was the only way to convince him to join me.

Typically for breakfast we would have a fruit smoothie made with coconut milk, green powder, protein powder and fruit along with 1-2 eggs. For lunch and dinner we would have salad, veggies and a main dish that had a meat in it. We were given a lot of recipes that were normal food but without dairy (except butter), grains (except brown rice) or any processed foods. The food we ate was delicious.

The hardest things about the cleanse were all of the time spent in the kitchen, finding acceptable snack foods and eating out. I enjoy cooking but it is really hard with a 1 and 3 year old to spend the time to cook everything from scratch. There was a lot of chopping, sauteing and preparation. We did finally find snack foods other than carrot sticks. We loved the Veggie Sticks and Veggie Chips dipped in hummus or guacamole and raw nuts. To satisfy my sweet tooth I would eat unsweetened raisins or medjool dates with almond butter or coconut.

By the end of the three weeks we were sick of balsamic vinegar and olive oil for our salad dressing and we were really ready to have cheese and bread again. Of course my sweet tooth wants sweets but not as much as I thought it would. Really after 21 days I told Sam that I wanted to continue to eat as much like the cleanse diet as possible.

So, our plan is to continue to eat breakfast like on the cleanse rather than return to our typical bagel and cream cheese. For lunch we want to only take sandwiches when it truly is more convenient and eat leftovers more. I will continue to cook dinner as much as I can but allow ourselves recipes with cheese and grains though not as the main ingredients.

The goal of the cleanse was to eliminate as much of the junk in our bodies as possible that we have built up due to consuming processed foods, non-organic foods and junk. Sam felt this more than I did because he was taking one supplement that I could not take due to nursing. We both feel good and we both lost weight. Sam lost 12 pounds and I lost 9. I had lost 6 pounds in the 6 weeks prior to the cleanse for a total of 15 pounds lost since Labor Day.

I encourage anyone to consider doing this type of a cleanse. It is great for your health.

Backyard fun

Finally the weather has been beautiful and we are able to spend more time outside without either sweating or getting drenched with rain. I am loving that the girls ask to go out and play every day. They really are enjoying their new swingset.

I love Katherine's "Boo" dress. The "Boo" actually buttons on so we can still wear the dress now that Halloween is over.

Here she is saying "Boo!"

She love to swing and says "higher, higher" with each push until all of a sudden she will say, "that's enough." Now Caroline will say "higher" as well. We can't forget Hooligan. She certainly makes our backyard time more interesting. For some reason she does not really like when the kids come down the slide and will bark at them. Luckily today she was enjoying a large stick, actually more of a log.It took Caroline only a few weeks to figure out how to climb the ladder to the fort all by herself. I was really hoping that this fall I could let them play in the yard while I cooked dinner but she must be supervised at all times out there. I am amazed at how fast and well she can climb that thing. She has not stumbled yet.

She has no fear and walks straight to the slide and goes down all by herself. It is a pretty fast and tall slide for a 15 month old but she loves it.

The girls like to give each other a push to go down the slide. Katherine has been told that it is not really a push but just a gently pat on the back. Caroline loves to push Katherine.

They also enjoy playing on the picnic table under the fort. They like to pretend that it is a restaurant and they are making me food. Here they are pretending to eat. Caroline is actually doing the sign language for "eat".I am so glad that we found and bought such a great swingset from a friend this summer. It has been great.

Pumkin Carving

We did not plan to carve a pumpkin this year because we had our awesome pirate pumpkin using Mr. Potato Head pieces. Well, after about 2 weeks that pumpkin had a mold growing in it and it was nasty. After reading so many books about pumpkins, fall and Halloween, Katherine wanted to carve one. I have these great pumpkin carving knives that are sharp enough to cut a pumpkin but not skin so Katherine was able to help.
She even helped remove some of the "ooey goey" but that did not last long.
She thought it was pretty gross and let me do the rest. It is not my favorite thing but I don't mind it too much.
When I asked Katherine about what kind of Jack-O-Lantern face she wanted, she said, "A happy one". I think we did a pretty good job.


Caroline joined in to watch the second half of the project. She liked Katherine's little pumpkin from school.
And here we have all of our pumpkins including the glitter pumpkins from the school Halloween party.

Fall Fun Fest

Wednesday we went to the Fall Fun Fest at our church. I have attended this every year I was in town since I was 12 so there are a lot of great memories.

Having 2 girls means we have a ton of dress up outfits so rather than buying a Halloween costume I just let Katherine choose one of her dress up outfits to wear. Her favorite princess is Cinderella so that is what she chose. I then gave her the choice of matching or not matching Caroline and she wanted to match so we had 2 Cinderella's.

This year our church really wanted the event to be more of an outreach. They went all out. There were probably 10 inflatables and 40 carnival games.

Katherine and Caroline loved the bouncy inflatable. It was the perfect level of difficulty and fun. There was a toddler obstacle course inflatable. Of course Caroline wanted to go through with Katherine. She is so brave. There were fun preschool games like go fish, ring toss and choose a duck. There was candy or other prizes for participating in each game. I liked that there were other prizes this year as well. Nana and Pops joined us for the evening. The girls always love spending time with them and it was a great help to have extra hands with the 100's of kids in costume.

The oddest thing that we did was the caterpillar tunnel. Once you went in, it was really just a tunnel but the exit was a little odd as you crawled out of the caterpillar's back end.