It looks like everyone had a great pre-Halloween weekend, we did as well. It started with Hayden’s Halloween school party on Friday (he only goes Wed, Thur and Fri.) Then we had our ward party on Friday night and we attended the Lakewood stake party on Saturday night with the Debaltzo's! Tons of fun and more candy that we could ever eat, and he hasn’t even trick-or-treated yet!! Yikes!! I told Hayden he could pick anything he wanted to be for Halloween and he changed his mind daily for a few weeks and finally settled on being robot. I thought “sure, I can make a robot costume pretty easily and save ourselves like $40.” Hahahah… I won’t think that again. He looked at pictures online and decided that he wanted a silver body and rectangle head... well that's what he got. Anyway, after way too much work and stress it all came together in the end and Hayden loved it. It only cost $10 so that’s not bad. As for Danica, we borrowed some costumes for her. She was a cheetah the first night and a ladybug the second night. Very cute and very easy!! Tom and I were duds and did nothing. After looking at the Vancouver pics we are feeling pretty badly about our lack of participation!

Merry Christmas to us! Our treadmill arrived on Friday! I ran a couple of miles on it on Saturday to test it and it felt great. It was a comfortable running surface and it has a TV built in to keep me from getting tired of looking at the wall. It’s awesome and I can’t wait until tomorrow when I can use it again.

We had Stake Conference today and President Packer was here. People were so excited to see him that they arrived for the meeting really early. We decided that we better try to be early so we arrived at 9:20, the meeting started at 10:00 in Kirtland. Little did we realize that arriving at 9:20 was about the same as arriving at 10:20 to a normal conference. We could barely find a seat in one of the overflow rooms in the relief society room. Apparently people arrived as early as 7:30 and the chapel was packed by 8:30….fortunately, we still got to enjoy the conference via the television feed into our room. (Although "enjoy" is a very relative term considering we were struggling to keep the kids busy and quiet for nearly three hours in a little tiny room, totally packed with people...enjoy....hmmmm....maybe the wrong word....) But, President Packer was fun to listen to. I don't think he had anything formal prepared, he just kind of talked. At one point he decided he wanted to know the words to the song "Scripture Power" because an early speaker had talked about it. He asked if anyone would come sing it for him...someone in the choir volunteered our ward primary chorister and she came running up from the back and sang it on the spot. All the kids stood up and sang it with her, Hayden loved it. Luckily our chorister is a brave and amazing woman. As you all know after my horrible karoke performance, I would have died on the spot if it had been me.

Danica is a little bit sick today. Hayden has a cold and cough and it seems that she has gotten it. She doesn’t have much of a runny nose or cough but her voice is really hoarse. It’s so sad to hear her try to cry or talk, it barely comes out! It’s really so cute and so sad! She is handling it fine and it just her happy cute little self. We have such problems with her waking up too early morning. Day-light savings doesn’t help! She of course woke up right at 7 (now 6am) just like every day… sigh… we just barely cured her of waking up at 5 or 6... now we get to do it again! Hopefully we can break that habit quickly this time…

One more thing: I was looking online today for something for Hayden to do to stay busy and still keep the Sabbath day holy. I found so many fun ideas for kids a bit older on this website, check it out. There is a version of Cranium that looks really fun. http://www.jennysmith.net/fhe/lds-games.php

Okay, well we are off to bed. Happy Halloween!