"Satan" comes to the door and Happy Meal lays an egg

When I went to Canada back in April, I didn't have any contact with the family for a couple days (being in a "foreign country" and all). When I finally got back to the U.S. (traveling a whole mile in an underwater tunnel that led to Detroit), I called Russ and he sounded funny. I said, "what kind of animal?" "Chickens" Our chicken called Happy Meal was the first to start earning her keep by providing us with a cute little egg.








Here are my Primary Activity Day Girls (I vote that the church come up with a cute name for them!). They spent a couple hours putting together kits to send to kids in 3rd world countries. Katie and her friend Jess are front and center.








We've had an old mostly dead willow tree in the back yard that the kids have fondly called the Womping Willow. This week Rusty discovered that it was full of hornets, so he cut it down, set it on fire, and he and the kids made s'mores.









Here's a picture of DJ and Caleb eating fish at our latest Sunday fish fry. The kids call it "Fishgiving". Tomorrow Rusty and Mark are going quail hunting, so does that mean we'll have quail instead of fish this Sunday?






After eating fish, we loaded up the kids and went to pick pinons. I love how Katie is holding up her new favorite book. We saw the movie today - Russ and the boys went to Madagascar- and I actually liked it much better than the book.

Now two stories:

First, "Satan at the door"- last Sunday at the end of church, Nathan came tearing into the Primary room and said, "Did you know Satan is bad and he gets in people's hearts? Did you know Satan has horns?" I cleared up second question, and as the day went on we were bombarded with questions about Satan. "Is Satan a boy or girl?" "How does he get in your heart?" "Did Anakin follow Satan?" (surely you saw that one coming!) Nathan's primary teacher called that night to tell me about a little discussion they had in class that day so I knew where all the Satan talk was coming from.

The next morning we got all the kids to school and I was in the bathroom putting some makeup on when the doorbell rang. I was still in my pj's so I asked Nathan to please not open the door, but he could look out the window and see if he knew who was there. He came running back to the bathroom and said, "Mom, it's a man and a lady. I think it's Satan!"

Later that afternoon, the principal and vice principal of the middle school dropped by, and said they had been there that morning but missed me. They had to make a certain home visit because a certain scatterbrained mother had her children vaccinated in August, but kind of forgot to update the school. If any of you know John Allen, you can give him trouble about Nathan thinking he was Satan!

Story #2 "Rusty and Amie have rotten luck"- In the "black Friday" walmart ad, there was a trampoline for a really good price. We threw around the idea of going over to Show Low at 4:00 the next morning, but decided that since the weather was bad we would just wait until 8:00 and take the kids over with us. We get there and walk into the garden center just as a worker is loading two trampolines up on a cart to take to a lady's car. Sure enough, those were the last two trampolines. We missed one by 5 minutes! Oh well! The birds that like to sleep in do not get the worms!