Haunted bedroom

As I've mentioned before, Halloween is one of those holidays that matters less and less to me each year. I think that will change as Joseph gets more excited about it, but for now it's still one which is more annoying than fun what with rounding up costumes and buying candy, which is surprisingly expensive. (It's also a little discouraging . . . I thought Tootsie Rolls would be a safe candy for me to buy, but it turns out I like them a lot better than I should.)

But there was one year where I really got into Halloween. I decided that my bedroom needed a haunted house theme. Since my bedroom was in the basement, it always had a sort of haunted house feel to it anyway -- you never knew if the blouse you tossed carelessly on the ground would have a wolf spider attached to it the next time you picked it up. But this year I wanted it to be really haunted. I had glorious plans for the decorations, the thrills, and the chills that would await any who dared enter.

I got started immediately, gathering construction paper and hunting down an empty boombox and tape cassette. When the rest of my family was elsewhere, I hurried and recorded myself screaming like a banshee for several seconds. I then propped up the boombox behind my door, attached an unsharpened pencil to my door via masking tape, and made it so that the pencil would hit the pause button whenever the door was open, unleashing my warbling fury on the world. After a bit of adjusting, it worked!

I then found a flesh-colored glove and filled it with water the best that I could. I stuck it in the freezer, preparing it for its life as the icy hand of death which would grab any intruders. I forgot about it for a while and busied myself cutting out construction paper pumpkins and witch silhouettes.

It was probably my dad who was the first to discover the terrors of my terrain. Instead of jumping when he heard my banshee cry, he just furrowed his brow for a moment, then peeked behind my door to see my little contraption. "This is cute," he probably said.

Over the next few weeks, there really weren't that many people who came into my bedroom. My siblings had some fun at first opening and closing my door to get the pause button to compress and release, making the screaming come in brief spurts. But that got old, and soon I was the only one to enter my room and hear the screams. And to be honest, it got kind of annoying. But I had to keep it there on principle. It was for Halloween, after all.

Thankfully, Halloween eventually came, and down came the decorations and banshee screaming. Time to decorate for Christmas.

A few months later, while I was sitting on my bed doing homework, my dad came in waving something hideous and icy. "Did you want this for anything? I found it in the freezer."

Come to think of it, I don't know how that icy hand of death would have fared in my bedroom anyway.

New family photographer

This evening, Joseph was bursting with joy. He was dancing and jumping and grinning and laughing so much that bedtime was the last thing on our minds. While Kevin and Joseph were playing downstairs, I was upstairs playing the piano. Joseph hurried up the stairs, did a ten-second duet with me, then hurried back down the stairs and told his dad:

"I am happy now."
"Why are you happy?"
"Because I play the piano."

He later said,
"I was sad, but now I'm happy."

This was such a proud parent moment for me that I had to record it. So down I went with the camera to capture it on film.

After I made this video,

Joseph decided it was his turn to have the camera. And so we began a mini photo shoot in our messy basement, punctuated by the occasional shot of his feet:

because awkward kissing pictures are just the best

Once Joseph noticed our silly faces, he giggled so much that we had to keep making them

Dentist face. His, not mine. 

Joseph was in hysterics over Kevin's tongue

Cheesin' it up

We were so happy to have our own personal photographer. I felt like Joseph finally understood how to use a camera.

But then it was bedtime for real. As I started to get Joseph ready (i.e. take off his pants), he started to sing.

Well, the camera was still right there, so I pulled it out again and made another video.

Naturally, it was his turn next. So he then made this video.

. . . actually, the camera didn't really survive that aerial shot. 5 years of hard work and a fall onto soft carpet did it in.

So I think our family photographer plans are done now too.

Our super duper Upper Peninsula adventure

I don't know if Kevin and I necessarily come across this way, but we kind of do things on a whim. Unless the activity we're doing needs a babysitter, we just kind of do things.

Although our success rate is generally low when it comes to recruiting people to join our last-minute escapades, we were lucky enough to find friends willing to join us in seeing the major sights of the Upper Peninsula in a day (even after we changed the plans on them a couple of times). I chalk it all up to my skills in persuasion -- "If you come with us, you get to spend about twelve hours in the car with . . . . us."

By some miracle, they agreed to it! And so we found ourselves Friday night buying snacks, looking at dozens of tourism websites, making sandwiches, and having trouble falling asleep in anticipation for our adventures that would begin in about 5 hours.

The next morning, we all met at the church and headed north. A couple of hours into the drive, Kevin noticed the sunrise in the rear view mirror. 

And that's when things got really good. Suddenly, we were enveloped in a world of vibrant reds and oranges and gliding through dense golden forests. As far as we could see there were tunnels and rolling hills of color.

Not, of course, that my camera could capture it.

I definitely tried though.

We arrived in Mackinaw City a little after 9 and decided to see the McGulpin lighthouse. Maybe it's just that I'm a bit taller than I was the last time I saw lighthouses, but this one was significantly shorter than I remembered those lighthouses being. They told us it still worked great, and since we saw it lit up later that night, I suppose they were right.

Chelsie and Lyndon! . . . and Kevin's shadow and Joseph.

Just us and our shadows.

We all liked throwing rocks in the water (especially at a big rock because they would break), but Joseph threw the biggest one.

No lighthouse is complete without an organ. How else would you play songs like this?

Don't get vertigo.

The view from the lighthouse.

After swinging past another lighthouse and a colonial thing that cost money, it was time to cross the bridge! It didn't collapse while we were on it, so we made it to the Upper Peninsula! At this point, I would have been content to turn around -- we had seen fall colors and we had set foot in the UP, but we figured that since we were here, we may as well actually see it.

And so we continued on. To our amazement, Joseph hardly protested being in his car seat so much of the day. I suppose when you've got two humans, one bear, one elephant, one gecko, one giraffe, and one meerkat to keep you company, drives aren't nearly as boring as they are usually. 

Our first stop was the Tahquemenon Falls. Joseph's primary concern here was that he could throw rocks and sticks into the waterfall. He got to throw them into the water, at least, if not the waterfalls themselves. 

For some reason, all these colors remind me of Skittles.

We ran into the Teicherts! Twice! Great minds think alike.

They say the brown color comes from tannin, whatever that is, but I think this must just be the runoff of some root beer float supply, complete with foam. 

I think there was something cool in this picture. That big stick, maybe.

At the Upper Falls. These pictures seriously take me back to my fast food days of soft drink dispenser spills.

He was probably protesting the stroller.

Looks steep.

By this point, it was mid afternoon, and we weren't sure what to do next. Although it wasn't on the itinerary, we figured we may as well see Pictured Rocks since we were sort of close. So off we went again, all of us jamming to the ultra-cool music we had brought along (the coolest being Garretts'  Mulan music). Joseph was pretty stoic about it all. Although the landscape as we drove had a lot more half-dead coniferous forests than I was expecting, there were still some glorious colors, especially as we approached Pictured Rocks.

Once there, we walked around, saw water, saw rocks, took pictures, tried to avoid landing in people's wedding photos (we seriously need to stop running into weddings), and then decided we were hungry.

A hoodoo! Looking out at it was just like Bryce Canyon. Only blue.

and a little green.

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.

Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry.

Sunshine on the water looks so pretty.

Sunshine almost always makes me high.

After eating some exceptionally healthy pizza (grease is good for you nowadays, right?), it was time to head home. By this time, the early morning wake-up was getting to us (well, maybe mostly me), and we found ourselves singing louder and louder and acting sillier and sillier, especially when "One Day More" from Les Mis came on. When I checked on Joseph, he had a look of concern on his face. Within about a minute that concern was replaced by full on sobbing. Oops.

Incidentally, out of the blue the next morning he said, "I was sad."
"Why were you sad?"
"Because I wanted you to turn off your singing."

He sure did, and it took a long time and a lot of silence to calm him down after that. He had one more meltdown after that, but the rest of the drive home went fairly smoothly. For all my talk of "I need to stay awake to help prevent drowsy driving and I don't have the life skills to fall asleep in the car (which is generally true)," I was the only one who slept at all on the way back. Go figure.

A little after 1, we pulled back into church parking lot. Our super duper Upper Peninsula adventure had come to an end.

And I'm almost caught up on sleep.

it's time to come on out.

The first Friday in October, I picked Leslie up from the airport for General Conference weekend. Like other times we had visitors, I had a mental checklist of things I hoped she would experience, including:

• Good weather. Well, after a week of glorious weather here and cold weather in Utah, the weather swapped so our weekend was pretty cold and windy! So we didn't spend much time outside, especially Saturday. But we still got to go on a nice walk Sunday and go to a cider mill Monday, so I guess it wasn't too bad.

• Good night's sleep. Finally, the truth came out -- sleeping on the futon was "a little more comfortable than sleeping on the floor." Everyone else who's slept there was just being tactful, or really tired.
  
• Good food. I had dropped Joseph off at a friend's house while I was picking Leslie up, and on our way to her house I ran into a Muslim neighbor of mine who was getting ready for their holy weekend. "It's kind of our holy weekend too," Leslie said, though I don't think he heard her. Anyway, we sort of forgot about the Hajj until we were driving to a Syrian place for lunch the next day. As we were pulling in, I said, "Wouldn't it be funny if this were closed for their holy weekend?" And then it was. But with a little bit more searching, we managed to find some falafels and shawarma for her to try. So I suppose it was a success.



Here is some other food at the ward conference brunch. I think it was also good.

• Good foliage. When Leslie came for Thanksgiving two years ago, I felt so bad that she had come after all the leaves had fallen. This year I was determined that she would get to see vivid colors. Since the leaves had already started changing by the beginning of August, I was afraid that General Conference was going to be too late. But then September was warm, so most of the trees were still green. To steer her mind away from this disappointment, I was sure to point out each and every tree that had non-green leaves. I'm sure she appreciated it.

There's one back there.

There are some more.

• Good games with good sports. I think the games were fun (Dominion, Skip-Bo, and Scrabble Apple), but there might have been a few sore losers. Or just one sore loser. Who was not Kevin or Leslie. Haha. Oops.
  
• Good nephew time. I think we succeeded here. Dance parties, tower building, story after story after story, cider mills, more tower building at the library . . . this was the real reason she came, right?

I love this one

• Good General Conference. It was great. Of course.

Whether or not my mental checklist came to fruition, we sure had a good time! Thanks for coming back to visit!

title inspiration: "Level Up," Vienna Teng (all of Leslie's blog titles are from Vienna Teng. And this song is about Detroit. So it totally works . . . right?)