Busy month

This month has absolutely flown by. We have been so busy this month. The kids are so ready for Halloween. We finally have all of their costume stuff done. Now the only thing left to do for costumes is to get the pants for Stan's and I need to finish up his antler. His office is doing a theme this year for the costume contest at work. They are doing characters from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". Stan was assigned to be Max the dog. He told me about it and said to keep my eyes peeled for a dog costume. I never saw one and asked him a few times what he had in mind for this costume. He procrastinated getting what he needed, so I have been running around trying to get his entire costume this week. He even had a 4 day weekend this past weekend and didn't do a single thing to get his costume ready. I have the antler almost finished and I need to make the ears. I found a brown sweatshirt on Wednesday, but no brown sweatpants. We need to hit the other Walmart tonight and see if we can find the sweatpants. After I take Rachael to dance, then I will finish up his antler and ears. He saw the ears he wanted last week but didn't pick them up.

Rachael is taking lessons from him this year. She has been telling me for months that she was going to be a pirate for Halloween. She decides a few weeks ago that she didn't want to be a pirate, but could not decide what she wanted to be. On Saturday night, she decided she was going to be Morticia Adams. We went to several stores trying to find the right dress. Her dress doesn't really look like Morticia's dress, but it will have to do. The dress we got is an adult witch dress, so it has some silver lacing on the bodice, and it is a full skirt rather than the form fitting skirts Morticia usually wears. We bought a long, black wig. She made me buy lice killing spray so she is sure she won't get lice from the wig. I think she is going to look great.

Andrew is going to be a ninja and Jeremy is going to be Indiana Jones. I had both of their costumes done by last Thursday. I am going to go to the church Trunk-or-treating as the Grinch so that Stan and I match. I bought a green sweatsuit, green face paint and green spray for my hair. I am going to buy green nail polish tonight just for added effect. I can't figure out what I am going to do about my feet though. I don't have any kind of green shoes and it is hard to find something that fits over my braces. I'll figure something out though. I'll post pictures after our Halloween activity tomorrow night.

Wonderful weekend

This weekend, we had a stake conference. We have a new Stake President as of this morning. President Palmer and his counselors, President Kent and President Williams, were released. I will miss having them as our stake presidency. I will especially miss having President Kent visit our ward. I'm sure our new stake presidency will be wonderful. Our new stake president is President Spears. I don't really know him although I have met him once. I spent a week at girl's camp with his wife last year. She is an amazing woman. Any man married to her is most likely just as amazing. His counselors are President Rawlinson for the first counselor and President Trejo for his second counselor. I don't know either of these men, but I do know Sis Trejo just a little bit, again from girl's camp. I'm excited to get to know these men through their talks and presence in our stake.

We heard some wonderful talks this weekend. We had a visiting member of the First Quorum of the 70, Elder Hamula. We also had an area 70 here, Elder Villareal. They spoke at both the adult session and the session today. One of the things they talked about was the importance of unity. They also talked about going to the temple more. That is something Stan and I have been wanting to do anyway. We keep saying we want to go more, but then our schedule gets busy. We need to make a point to make our appointment and set our scheduled date to go to the temple early so nothing gets in the way. We have a very full schedule for the rest of the month already, so we won't be going in October, but I want to go in November. It would be wonderful to some day get a temple in Austin, but that won't happen until we keep the San Antonio temple so busy that they need to put another temple in the area. That isn't going to happen if we aren't doing our part. The Savior will come again and soon. It may not be soon to me, but it will be soon to our Heavenly Father. Our life is but a binking of his eyes. There is so much work still yet to be done in the temple. If we don't get this work done, then everything will be wasted. I can't assume that other people will do it. I need to do my part. I need to do as much work as I can. My goal is to go to the temple every 2 months. Since we are going to go to the temple in November, then I guess we are going to go in the odd months.

If you are a member of the church and you are reading this blog, I challenge you to go to the temple as often as you can. If you are not a member of the church, then I challenge you to learn as much as you can about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Our trip to the coast

We went down to Corpus Christi this past weekend for a short family vacation. We had a great time. We rented a condo on the North beach in Corpus. We had to walk across the parking lot to be right on the beach. The weather was really nice. It wasn't too hot, but it was warm enough that we could swim in the ocean without getting cold. The water temperature was in the mid 80's and felt really good. I got to really break in my new camera. I took my Powershot as well as my Rebel. When we were on the beach, I had my Powershot with me. I didn't want to leave my Rebel sitting in my bag while we were in the water. My Powershot takes great photos still. I took a bunch of pictures at the aquarium and the art museum on Sunday. I used my Rebel then. Here are a few of the pictures I took this weekend. They are in no particular order and definitely not in the order they were taken.
This is a picture I took at the aquarium of the Bull shark that was in the big tank. I took this one with the Rebel. I tried a manual setting without a flash. I didn't want to use a flash and have it reflect off the glass. It turned out a little creepy, but cool.
Here are the dolphins. They were getting ready to do their show, which takes place right above the tank. I loved this shot. It looks really cool. I think I got better photos in the viewing area below the tank than I did during the show. I did get some with the dolpins in the air though.
Here is Jeremy in an observation bubble inside one of the tanks. He said it made him feel like he was in the water without getting wet.

Here is a picture of the Lexington at night. The Lexington has a nickname of the Blue Ghost. I don't know how it got that nickname, but because of that, they shine blue lights on the ship at night. You can see them quite a ways away. It looks neat and this photo doesn't do it justice.
Here is the sunrise from the balcony of our condo. It was very pretty. I wished I would have been down on the beach for those. Stan and I went down to the beach on Monday morning to watch the sunrise together and take pictures, but there was a lot of clouds in the distance and the sunrise was not as spectacular and colorful.
We went out to the National Seashore on Saturday. There was a lot of debris on the beach from Hurricane Ike. They had garbage bags available and everyone picked up trash along the beach until it got too heavy for Stan to carry. A lot of it was wet as it has just poured down rain. You can still see all the rain clouds in the background.
This photo is actually suppose to go the other direction, but Blogger keeps turning it and I can't figure out how to turn it back. I thought the footprints in the sand looked neat. There were no other prints on this area of the beach and it had just rained rather heavy, so Rachael's footprints were the only ones there.


This was actually taken the first day we were there, the first time they got into the water.Here are 2 pictures of my kids being eaten by a giant shark at one of the gift shops on Padre Island. We actually have a picture of Stan's dad that is very similar to this one. It may have even been at the same place, but I have to find it and compare. They really hammed it up for these photos. It was not planned that Jeremy would be playing dead when I took Rachael's picture. I didn't even notice it until we downloaded the camera. It makes Rachael's expression even funnier seeing Jeremy "impalled" on the shark teeth.

The kids already want to know when we are going back. We will probably go down next fall again. Stan is planning on doing the MS bike ride next year. That ended in Corpus on Sunday while we were there. The Cub Scout pack is going to the Lexington to spend the night in January also. I don't know if I will go yet. I have to call them and find out how accessable it is to the mildly disabled and how bad the beds are going to kill my already sensitive back.

We had a lot of fun, no one got hurt (I only got a mild sunburn, but no one else did) and there was very little fighting among the kids. We made some very good memories and I am so glad for that.