Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween everyone!  As usual, we made the annual pilgrimage to the local pumpkin patch, BiZi Farms.  Karina (and some random boy) made it to the top of the hay pyramid.

Xiao enjoyed riding on top of the saddle and you can practice lassoing a calf.

He also ground some corn.

Karina had fun feeding the goats.  Some of them get super pushy and the little ones sometimes stick their heads under the grating!

They tried the elephant ear.  This time it was not super good...tasted like a deep fried tortilla.

We took a ride on the tractor pulled wagon out to the pumpkin patch.  The cousins from Denver were in town too.

Everyone made their selection and their other cousins who semi-recently moved back from Alaska were there too.

And we washed off the dirt and grime off of the pumpkins.  It was a fun but very wet trip!

A couple weeks later, it was time to carve the pumpkins.

Just the buys decided to carve this year.  They did their own guts this time.

Xiao decided he wanted to carve a spider into his.

Gabe's, I think, was some creature from Minecraft, which is a computer game he plays.

Here they are in their costumes.

Gabe's costume was a last minute purchase.  The selection had been pretty picked over and he wasn't interested in being something scary.  So panda it is...and he was very happy with it!

It was a pretty rainy Halloween evening.  We first walked around our new neighborhood.  Lots of folks were not around...

Lucky came along, but maybe after a while wished that he didn't.  Eliana made him his costume--his wings.  He's supposed to be a fruit fly.  He didn't really have a say in that.

We then went to our old neighborhood and the first house we visited was that of our old neighbors.  It was great seeing them.  They have known all of our kids since they were born and have watched each of them grow up.    They had a pretty elaborate set up on their porch, with a fake life sized skeleton, a huge hairy spider and even a fog machine.

Emily took Gabe to go trick-or-treating with a friend from school while Karina and Xiao trudged on.

In the end, everyone got tons of candy.  Especially Gabe, who trick or treated for the longest.  After 2 hours, he came home sopping wet but very happy with about 10 pounds of candy!  Wow!

Shrek the Musical

The girls continue to be involved in the youth community theater group and in the fall, they participated in Shrek the Musical.  

Karina got cast as the character Baby Bear and here she is practicing putting on her make-up.  All the kids are responsible for putting on their own make-up.

It was a wonderful show.  On most nights, it was a packed house.  Unfortunately, on the first of the two weekends, Karina came down with the flu.  She had to miss two of the six shows.

But she bounced back for the second weekend.  Eliana was a guard and they both did a wonderful job!

Happy Thanksgiving!

After Halloween, it felt like Thanksgiving came right on its heels.  This year was slightly different because around that time, the World Cup started.

The games were halfway around the world in Qatar, so we had to get up early to watch this 5am England game.  

It was worth it but Gabe was tired afterwards.

Our Thanksgiving dinner was smaller and more subdued.  Which made prepping for dinner a lot easier.  Gabe is helping to chop the garlic for the collard greens.  And Emily is checking out our supply of Martinelli's, which is a must at our house.

We had one friend over for roast chicken and potatoes.  And she contributed dinner rolls which were very yummy.

During that weekend, we started hanging up the Christmas lights.

Also we watched more World Cup.

To commemorate the Brazil game, we drank some Guarana, a Brazilian soft drink.  This was our last precious can which we'd been saving for a long time.

The whole family watched and got into it.  The games with Brazil were exciting and nerve wracking at the same time.  But eventually, when they lost to Croatia, we were extremely upset and depressed for a long time.  They seem to always falter when facing a strong European team.

That weekend, Karina also made some caramel from scratch.

She sticks it into a glass pan to cool.

And then she slices them and cuts them into bite sized pieces.  They are very tasty.

And so it was a low-key weekend.  Hope you had a good Thanksgiving as well!

Goodbye old home, Hello new home

We've been sort of in the market for a new home in order to have more bedrooms for our kids, and so have been looking...for the past four years.  

After looking at various houses, nothing was coming up that fit the bill until this past July.  We made an offer on the house in August, closed in September and started moving in on October 1.

The last time that we had moved homes was when the Yuen family was kidless and moving from a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.  This time around, we have four kids and lots more STUFF.

To move stuff, we needed boxes, lots of boxes.  Which are great to build towers with.

In preparation for moving, Karina got excited about designing the layout of their new bedroom.  She got our her house layout stencil set which she has and started mocking up the girls' room.

She really likes doing this sort of thing and cut out the shapes of the furniture to see where it would fit best.

Part of moving means packing.  However, the new house is only a couple of miles from our old one.  So instead of putting all our clothes in boxes or suitcases, we stuffed most into large Ikea bags and drove it over.

Here is Xiao Yu's room at our old house...all vacated!

And we needed to move the chickens as well!  They probably didn't like it very much but we stuffed them into large Rubbermaid bins.

Had to catch them first!

This one got away!

Because it was the end of summer, our sunflowers were all mature and full of seeds.  So Karina collected the seed heads to feed to the chickens later on.

And here is our house empty of almost everything except furniture.

We moved houses on this day...

We had a bunch of friends help us move our boxes on a certain Saturday.

It took several hours, but with about 10 people helping, we moved all our stuff into the garage.

The movers came several days later to move the large things.  Like our super heavy piano.  The movers moved all our couches, coffee table, dining table, beds, bookcases....everything...in only 3 hours.  They were fast!

Our first meal at the new house consisted of Costco rotisserie chicken.  Mostly because now Costco is less than a quarter mile from our new house.  

The new house happens to have a little 2-bedroom extra dwelling on the land, which we call the cottage.  It was the original little farmhouse on the land before the farm was developed into a neighborhood and our current house was built.  It turns out that it did not have a proper foundation so we had one put in.  The foundation contractors had to excavate a huge amount of soil under the cottage and did it by using a vacuum truck to vacuum the soil.  The truck sounds like a vacuum cleaner on steroids...it's super loud, even from 30 feet away!

There are a few things that are different about the new house.  It has a more expansive pantry.

The stairs has walls on both sides, which our resident monkey like to take advantage of.

A bigger grassy area in the back to play soccer on.

It also has a bunch of moles living there.  Lucky likes to dig into the tunnels they make, but has yet not caught any.

It also had a nice maple tree in the front which is good for climbing.  Unfortunately it was planted super close to the foundation and we're going to have to cut it down soon and plant a new, baby tree further away from the house.

Here is Karina setting up her new room.  She got a loft bed, and so has lots of space underneath for her stuff.

Another advantage of the new house is that it is SUPER close to 7-Eleven.  Which means easier access to Slurpees, which may be Karina's favorite food (if it can be called a "food".)

But being in a new house does not mean that everything in life stops.  Some things keep marching on, such as piano lessons, for which you have to practice for.

So that is our  the new house.  We are getting settled in and adjusting to it!