Kansas City

This past weekend, Brandon and I were lucky enough to get to go to Kansas City for an adults weekend. Brandon and I were invited at the beginning of October to come up for the weekend and go to a Zac Brown Band concert with our friends Megan and Derrick.

We dropped the boys off at my mom and dad's and then headed on our way out of town. We were enjoying our time together, but all we could talk about was the boys! Once we arrived in Liberty, we hung out for a little bit until Megan got home from work. We decided to go out to dinner in Kansas by the Kansas speedway. They have an awesome set up that it like three times the size of the Branson Landing. It was awesome! We ate at a Louisiana themed Cajun restaurant. It had a live jazz band and everything was decorated for Mardi Gras. It was really good. After dinner we slowly made our way to the movie theater to watch Due Date. We stopped by a restaurant called T- Rex. It was amazing. I have never seen anything like it. It had a Build- A- Bear inside of it where you could build a dinosaur. The entire restaurant had animatronic animals, dinosaurs, sea creatures and several live aquariums. We definitely plan on taking the boys up there in the near future.

We headed to the movie- which was pretty funny. We were so exhausted on our way home, that as soon as we got back, we passed out at their house. The next morning and Derrick had made a yummy breakfast of scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy. After breakfast we got ready and headed to their church. It's a new church, that is currently meeting in a warehouse. It was a service full of praise and worship and an awesome sermon. We love our church, buts it's cool hearing other pastors speak.

After church we headed back to their house, took naps and ate some Cincinnati Chili. It was really good. I had never had it before, and am normall not a person that likes change- but I'll have to make it sometime soon! After our late lunch we started getting ready and headed downtown to the Power and Light district. After finding a spot we were on a mission to find a place to eat some appitizers. It was a lot harder than we thought it would be. The Chiefs game was on, and with how P&L is set up- it was packed. We couldn't really find anywhere to eat and knew that we didn't want to eat stadium food, so we went into the Makers Mark Lounge. It was a little fancier than we had planned on and took forever for service. We weren't too happy by the time we left, but were ready to get to the concert.

We had a great time during the concert. We missed part of the opening acts, but had been advised by my friend Carrie, that they weren't very good anyway. I agree, they were horrible. One was a guy that played the fiddle, and the other were a couple of middle aged hippies named the " The Wood Brothers". Finally ZBB came on, and they played for over 2 hours. They did a great job. We had floor seats, and enjoyed every minute of it!

Brandon had to be at work early on Monday morning and my dad(who was watching the boys), had a job to start, so we left Liberty around 6:30. Luckily since we were south bound we didn't run into any traffice. Once we got onto HWY 7, I crawled into the very back of the Armada and slept until we got to Springfield. Brandon ran in the house chaged clothes, and left for work before the boys ever got home. We continued about our day like nothing had ever happened!

Halloween Pt 2

All day yesterday, Brandon and I were trying to decide whether or not to take the boys trick or treating. We went back and forth; we don't give the boys a ton of candy, but then we wanted them to get to wear their costumes again and thought that it might be kinda fun. Once we made the decision to go, we couldn't decide where to take them. Should we drive the 15 minutes to my parents house? Should we stay and just go to the few houses in our neighborhood? Should we take them across the street to a nice neighborhood and wander through a couple of streets?

So after a half debate, we finally decided that we would take them and we would go to the nice neighborhood across the street. We waited until the boys got up from naptime, fed them a quick dinner, and got dressed up. We were lucky this year- the weather was gorgeous. Since the boys are so hot natured, we didin't have to bundle them up under their outfits. They were so excited!

We parked in the country club parking lot of Fremont Hills, and wandered up and down a couple of streets. Greyson kept saying that he wanted to keep going and get more candy, so we decided to head to the other side of the neighborhood. They didn't quite get the concept of saying "trick or treat" but everyone just ooohed and awwed at them.
Brandon and I loved watching Greyson aka "the crazy monkey" run full force from house to house. They listened very well. Once we got to the other side of the neighborhood, we stopped a could of times to take a candy break. They were so cute sitting there. A few of the houses were having block parties and had the big inflatable haunted house outside of their door, so you would have to walk through the inflatable to get to the front door or the candy. Daniel was a little creeped out by it, but was determined to get the candy!

We finally headed back to the house after a couple of hours of being out. Brandon and I were exhausted, the boys had to go potty, and Daniel was wanting to be carried. All in all we had a great time and finished up the night watching Hocus Pocus. They didn't really watch it, they were just digging through the candy!

Halloween pt1

This year Halloween fell on a Sunday, so our church opted to do their annual Fall Festival on Saturday night. We had been talking to the boys about getting to dress up in their cosutmes, play games and get candy for days. They were so excited- they didn't even take naps!

Don't they look so excited?!
When 4pm rolled around we got them out of their rooms, got them dressed, and headed to the church. Our little dragon (Daniel), Monkey (Greyson), and tiger (Lincoln) looked so cute! When we were loading them in the car, Daniel got stuck because he couldn't get his tail in his carseat! We all died laughing as he was telling us he was stuck, and Greyson responded, "You're kiding me, Daniel!"


Mimi and Pappaw met us at the church and watched the boys play for a little bit. It was very crowded and hot, so they headed home after a while. After playing all the "little" kid games we headed into the gym, where for the first time all three boys were able to play on the bigger kid inflatables. While the looks on their faces don't show the excitement, they were so happy. Greyson wanted to go on the big slide multiple times, and they each did the obstacle course atleast twice.

When things started closing down, we took them upstairs to my rooms for JH, so they could look at them. They got to hang out with some of the youth for a few minutes, until they started trying to eat all their candy before dinner! Daddy was nice though and took them to Taco Bell.

Judgement House

I wish I had pictures or movies to explain this to you better.
Every year at Halloween our church puts on a production entitled Judgement House. This is the opposite of a Haunted House but still give youth something productive to do. JH is a room to room skit usually going through 9 or 10 rooms of our church, in which you follow a day in the life a youth. This youth has had a trumatic death occur in his close group of friends, and you get to see how he deals with it.
OUr church first started doing JH in 1996. I was able to be one of two non- youth workers that was allowed to do it. My friend Amber and I played suffering people in the hell scene. For the first three or four years that is the scene I always worked in. It was labor intensive, but so much fun. As I got older I started doing other parts, and was able to see how much JH impacted other peoples lives. When I got into college, I helped with set up in a couple of scenes, but wasn't nearly as involved as I had been in years past. Then when I got married and had kids- it was all I could do to go through JH!
This year I was asked to be the "director" of the Judgement and Hell scences. These two scenes are attempting to give you an accurate dipection of what happens after death (judgement) and what happens if you aren't a Chrisitan. These two scenes are VERY labor intensive in setting up and getting everything prepared. Luckily, I didn't really have to do anything to the hell scene. Judgement on the other hand- took me about 24 hours over three days to get ready. I had some very very good help.
As it is every year JH was a huge success. I forget the final numbers, but I believe a little over 1,000 people came through during the six nights. It was amazing, humbling, and a huge blessing to be able to be involved on the level that I was. I am thankful to Brandon and my parents for watching the boys as much as they did, so that I could make the church my second home for a couple of weeks! I can't wait until next year. I've already started brainstorming how to decorate it better.

Fun Weekend with Friends

This weekend was an exciting weekend in the Howard House. Our good friends Derrick and Megan came and spent the weekend with us. We haven't seen them since my crazy birthday weekend, and they've never met the boys.
It all started when Megan invited us to come up to Kansas City in November for the Zac Brown Band concert. We started talking about Halloween and how when we were in college we loved going to the corn maize out by Aurora. Since it's been a good six years since Brandon and I have gone, I thought it might be a fun thing to do to relive some good memories. They were just as excited about the idea as we were. Plus since they had never met the boys, it was a good time to come down and visit.
They came down on Saturday, and came into a house of craziness. Since the weather is still very warm, we decided to grill some steaks and have a somewhat college meal. Steak, potatoes, & chips and dip! A little bit a class and a little bit of cheapness! After dinner we got the boys packed, dressed in their pj's, and loaded up to take out to my parents house.
We headed to the maize about 8:30. Not truly realizing how long it would take us to get there.... we weren't in a big hurry until we looked at the website and saw it closed at 10. It took us over a hour to get to the middle of nowhere. We met up with some more of Megan's friends, waited in line for a while and then entered into the maize. It wasn't as creepy as I remember, but I still wasn't all that crazy about it. I hate scary things. When Brandon and I were dating we went to watch a very creepy movie and I still sleep with a night light in my room, unless he is there. I don't like things jumping out at me. I don't like clowns. I questioned myself a couple of times, as to why I of all people thought this was going to be fun. I stayed in the middle of our group for the most part. It wasn't until almost midnight and we were still in the maize that I started to get in the front of our group. At one point Megan and I went the opposite way as everyone else, and got one of the security guards to mislead everyone else, while we hid to jump out and scare them. It was pretty funny.
On our way back, the boys wanted to stop by their old fraternity house and relive more fun times. We didn't think about it being fall break, so they wondered around an empty house. We finally got headed home only to find that Derrick and Brandon had fallen asleep in the backseat!! We passed out as soon as we got into the house.
Sunday afternoon we ordered pizza and stayed in our jammies well into the afternoon. The boys returned from a fun night at Mimi's and morning at church to play with their new friends. Megan played Backyardigans songs on her Iphone, so they pretty much think she hung the moon.
It was a great weekend. It went by too fast, but Brandon and I are excited to go to Kansas City for a weekend next month for visiting and ZBB!

Movie Day

Have I ever mentioned how much I love these little boys?! Today was a lazy day around our house.... sometimes I feel like we are starting to have too many lazy days! We sat around and watched movies and ate popcorn..all before lunch! They are going through a superhero kick right now, so we watched Iron Man before lunch and Iron Man 2 afterward. They snuggled up and enjoyed yelling everytime they saw Iron Man!

We don't normally let them watch these kinds of movies, but we selectively edit what they see. They mainly get to watch Iron Man building his suit and flying around, they don't know that they are missing out on the rest of the movie!

Cousins

This summer the boys were so excited to have their cousins over for a play day. My cousins are three of the coolest, well behave boys I have ever met, so I was so excited to have them over for the day too! I decided since water toys were such a hit on Memorial day, that I would bring them out for a while again today. I didn't think about the temp or the sun beating down on us, but we had a great time. We started out with the slip and slide and then filled up the pool. I looked a litte crazy out in the front yard with an inflatable pool, six kids, two dogs, and myself sitting in a folding chair spraying them down with hose, but we were having a blast!
We played for a few hours, ate some homemade pizza for lunch and then headed back out. The older boys were showing the younger boys how to jump in and do all kinds of crazy things. Funny story of the day:
It was almost nap time for the little guys, so I took Greyson inside to get him changed while I left the twins out with my cousins. After a few minutes of changing G, taking him potty and getting him ready for bed, I headed back outside. I forgot that I had let the dogs out in the process of taking care of Grey, so I paniced when I went out front and couldn't find Daniel. Taylor found him about ten seconds later in the back part of our yard standing next to Maggie(our pug). I ran out back (we have a half acre) to find Daniel beat red standing next to Maggie attempting to do a #2. I quickly picked him up and ran to the front door only to not make it to the potty in time. As I was running up the front stairs, it happened. We were all laughing so hard. I was trying not to panic, and keep Daniel calm, but it was too funny.

I put the boys down, and the big boys and I played Wii and talked. It was a good bonding time! I can't wait to have them over again.