Park + Movie - Rain = Awesome

"How Green Was My Valley" at Bryant Park.

We had 6 blankets full of people and enough Twizzlers to feed a small army.

Excellent.

Quilting

Ok, I know I brag about my FHE group a whole big bunch... but they are just so darn cool and blog-worthy, I can't help it.

A couple of months ago we started choosing a theme for each month. And the theme for this month is "Create," from Elder Uchtdorf's talk "Happiness, Your Heritage," (link for full talk: http://www.lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-947-37,00.html) as illustrated in this YouTube montage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhLlnq5yY7k.

So I asked Carolyn to be in charge of the activity this week, and we QUILTED! How fun is that! Our FHE group made a quilt together. She had a bunch of fabric squares left over from all of her fashion designing and crafts and such, and we cut up the squares and sewed them together. I'll take pictures of the finished product next week and post them.

See, to fully appreciate just how happy this made me, you have to understand that I have been wanting to quilt for FHE all year... I could just never had quite the means to pull it off.

So today I salute Carolyn, for allowing us to quilt for FHE.

Next week... origami!!!

Urban S'mores

We are sadly lacking for campfire opportunities here in the City. That did not dissuade Jeff and Russell however, from having s'mores as our treat at FHE a few weeks ago. Hence, urban s'smores were born...

Marshmallow enfuego...


Jeff survey's the damage... Not black enough, back to the burner...


Gabbi, Kathleen and Russell crowd in the narrow hallway and enjoy...


Mmm.

Halloween, Part 1: The Great FHE Pumpkin Adventure

My calling the Manhattan 8th Ward is Family Home Evening Group Leader. So every Monday, we get together and end up laughing until our sides hurt. It is seriously the most fun you could think of.

The week of Halloween, we got very festive and decided to carve pumpkins. We had over 30 people show up (which is remarkable, because average turnout for most FHE groups is 5-10 people), and we celebrated in style.

Sarah and Jeff, Squash Artists:



Russell, with his best pumpkin face:



Matt, the pumpkin artist... He takes this very seriously...




Some people carved pumpkins, Sarah and Jane ate caramel dipped apples...



And then Jane and Joey tried to eat their pumpkin...



The glowing results...

(I'm not sure what the story is with the Jack the Jew pumpkin, honestly, I have no idea).

We called the pumpkin on the left the "Twilight" pumpkin, because it is a vampire about to bite a woman's neck, and the one on the right we called "Scarface" for obvious reasons...

Hooray for FHE! Hooray for Pumpkin Carving!