Girl Scout Halloween Party!

We had our little Girl Scout Halloween Party

last night and I just had to share how cute all the
kids were looking in their costumes!

They had a lot of fun playing pin the nose on the pumpkin, singing songs and doing a bean bag toss. We also had lots of good and scary food! It was pot luck and on the menu we had...
Worm hotdogs (a very clever mommy made hot dogs and then cut them up to put inside hot dog buns! to make it look like worms! So awesome!). Vampire Blood Punch (Fruit Punch)
Creepy Crawly Mac & Cheese ( Homemade Mac N Cheese with little plastic bugs & spiders inside). Monster dip (Green food coloring added to cool whip) for fruit tray and Mummy sauce (Ranch dressing) for the veggie tray! I brought Halloween cupcakes and "Bones & Blood" (Bone shaped bread sticks & marinara sauce!)

All the girls had a great time and munchkin even won an award for her costume...
"Best Costume"!

My little Candy Corn Witch!

Tonight the festivities continue with a family event that's going on base. "Ghouls in the Park" They have trick-or-treating for the kids and also games and a hayride! I can't wait! Have you guys done any Halloween events or activities with the kids yet?

Milspouse Friday Fill-In

1. The best part of October was Hearing from the doctor that we have a good chance of trying again this month! And doing all the fun stuff with munchkin... the corn maze, the pumpkin picking, the "camp in" and the s'mores!

2. The worst part of October was dealing with all the BS from my neighbors. :P
3. For Halloween, I’ll be taking the kiddo around the neighborhood to get her some treats!
4. I hope that in November that I can give you an announcement that we are pregnant.

5. Wifey has posted MilSpouse Secret Santa. I will not be participating... sorry, I really do want to... but there is just too much going on for us as a family, and my parents will be coming to visit during that month so I want to save as much as possible to be able to do fun stuff with them while they are here. Maybe next year, if she does it again :(

Book Review: Death by the Dozen by: Jenn McKinlay

Melanie Cooper and Angie DeLaura are determined to win the challenge to the chefs at this year's Scottsdale Food Festival. Taking home first prize will be great publicity for their Fairy Tale Cupcakes bakery-and beating rival Olivia Puckett will be the cherry on top.

Mel's mentor from culinary school, Vic Mazzotta-now a Food Channel celebrity chef- is one of the judges, but Mel and Angie will have to win fair and square by whipping up delicious cupcakes with a mystery ingredient.

Though the real mystery is who put Vic Mazzotta on ice, literally-when his dead body is found inside a freezer truck. Mel and Angie will need to use their best judgement to find the cold-blooded killer who iced Vic, or they may lose more than the contest-they may lose their lives...

Loved it! I seriously LOVE how this series is going! Thank you Jenn, for another great book and another epic Mel & Angie adventure! As usual, you had me guessing till the end! I loved the story and it had a death had a great style in this book! Who would have though... could kill someone... ;) Can't wait to read "Red Velvet Revenge" next! And I am hoping that Joe and Mel might be hearing wedding bells in their future!

S'mores weekend!

This weekend was fabulous! The kiddo and I went out with her girl scout troop on Saturday morning to Southern Promiseland farm again. We had a great time with the other girls on the hayride, picking out our pumpkins and getting lost in the maze. We had nice weather, better than the weekend we went the first time, so that was nicer for when we were doing our trek through the corn. :)

We were supposed to go camping this weekend with girl scouts but that ended up getting canceled because there just wasn't enough time to do a good camping trip. We had already bought s'more making stuff last week and well we... couldn't just let them go to waste! LOL

Thank you Crystal for giving me the idea about making them with sterno! I would have never though of that and it worked like a charm! My whole family loved making them and roasting the mallows so we thank you so much! :)

Here's some of the great pics I took of our s'more fun... oh and just for the heck of it and also so I would know how to do it... I brought out the tent we bought about 4 years ago and put it up in the living room! Munchkin had a great time "camping" in it over Saturday night LOL!

I feel pretty proud of myself that I've still "got it!"
I put the whole thing up in less than 45 minutes! I just couldn't believe it fit in my living room... it wasn't totally opened up since, I couldn't stake down the sides, I just did as much as I could but yet still get around the living room and open the front door, ya know...
in case of emergency or fire LOL!

Our S'more tray! We had regular vanilla, chocolate vanilla & strawberry! YUM!

Roasting our mallows, hubby is roasting mine since I am taking the picture... he told me I needed to add that tidbit so the people who read my blog wouldn't think he is a fat a$$ LOL!

My girl's s'more face! Isn't she awesome! :)

This is how hubby likes his... burnt to a crisp... he call's it "toasted" lol!

It worked really well... once the sterno was on fire for a while... at that point we could do 2-3 a one time and it was great! I used an old pan with a bit of foil on top
just in case there was any spillage.

Ole! Mallows enfuego!

Mine! Oooey, oooey, goodness! That is what s'mores are made of! :)

MilSpouse Friday Fill-In

1. I want to get out of our current housing sitch, I would really love to move back to Florida but hey, that's just not possible right now. We are just dealing with alot of crap right now, and I can't really get into too much of it... sorry :(

2. I have a fun filled weekend planned with the kiddo! Well... after we go back to the corn maze again with the girl scouts.

3. I wish I had more hope & faith this month than all the negativity I feel.

4. I hope for what I hope for every month... that this will be IT!

5. I wonder how many times we will go through this, and if we will ever get there. I'm getting close to trying and really am honestly ready for the break that will happen next year because of the big "D".

Wow! I just realized how depressing my MFF is! Sorry in advance! In other news, I did go to the doctor yesterday. Apparently they are a little concerned about that cyst I have on the right ovary, its been there for months now but its not hindering me just yet, so we have full clearance to go ahead with the meds and try again this month. I am trying to be hopeful. Maybe if I stop hoping it will happen? Wouldn't that be my luck LOL!

I have also been thinking of tattoo designs, yes... I am getting the itch again and what better excuse do I have than while hubby is on his D, in fact... I'm thinking I might get one that is D themed. Thoughts? Ideas? Do any of you have "military dedicated" tattoos? If so comment me and link me up to a pic or an idea. I would be forever greatful... I have a few ideas that I'm tossing around but nothing concrete yet.

We are also going back to the corn maze this weekend. The munchkin's girl scout troop has decided they want to go this weekend instead of going camping. She was a little disappointed that we were not going camping but she is excited to be doing something with her girl scout friends. I might and that's a big MIGHT set up the tent in the back yard this weekend and do some back yard camping on Saturday night. IF I can set it up... we bought this tent about 4 years ago and have never even taken it out of the box! It's HUGE too... it sleeps 8-10 people so, I'm not sure I even have enough room in the enclosed back yard. If I do try to set it up I will take pics to show... promise! I, more than anything want to make smores! We have marshmallows in the pantry and they are just staring at me every time I go in there! Saying come on Jess! Just make us! :D Trouble is... I don't have anything to roast it with... I don't think housing would allow us to dig a fire pit in the back yard and we don't have our little grill anymore (it died in our last PCS). I want to buy one of those nice wrought iron fire pits (ya know, the kind that you have on patios) but let's face it... I cannot justify buying a $80 marshmallow roaster! LOL! Any ideas on how else I can roast marshmallows? I know I can make smores in the oven, microwave, and even by solar power... but its still not the same as having a fire roasted, toasted, marshmallow!

Anyway, have a great weekend! And please do excuse the depression in my questions above... I'll get better, its just a rough patch right now. I promise to stay the same crazy, random, sometimes funny always geeky Jess that you read about :)

Our A-maze-ing Saturday!

Saturday we packed up the car and headed out to Southern Promiseland Farm in Kiln, Mississippi. Since we've moved here we have started making this one of our fall traditions. I really love taking the munchkin out there to see and do things she normally doesn't get to while living in a bit city. I grew up in a small town and then lived in a rural community outside of that town for a while too, and I know how much fun playing in the dirt, riding tractors and going horseback riding can be! This year we brought along a friend of hubby's and his kids and we all had a great time getting lost in the corn maze, shooting the corn cannon and picking pumpkins! Here's some of the pic's to prove it! Hope you all had a great weekend as well. :)

This was a fun little mini maze mystery that the kids could figure out. There were six farm animals that stole Farmer John's apple pie. You had to go around the maze to the stations and trace the animal print with crayon to figure out which six were the ones who did it. For the record... it was the Llama, the chickens, the duck, the cat, the dog, and the horse. I just knew... Llama's couldn't be trusted! LOL!

Off they go into the corn!

Tracing the animal print

She's almost 4 foot tall! And only in Kindergarten! At this rate she will be over 6 feet by the time she graduates high school! Sheesh!

She loved the tire horse!

It was a beautiful day too!

Oh no! It's CORN MAN!!!
(Well, ok it's just hubby, but it was fun to scare the kids a little bit)

The munchkin shooting the corn cannon! The corn cob goes in the barrel and then builds pressure with gas and then you hit the button to release it. Her corn shot over 500 yards!

Pumpkin picking time! YAY! We took a hayride to the pumpkin patch and let the kids pick out their own pumpkins.

And here's her little "baby pumpkin" (as she liked to call it) that she picked out.
All in all I'd say it was a wonderful day!

Book Review: The Help by: Kathryn Stockett

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step... Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, raising her seventeenth white child. She's always taken orders quietly, but lately it leaves her with a bitterness she can longer bite back. Her friend Minny has certainly never held her tongue, or held on to a job for very long, but now she's working for a newcomer with secrets that leave her speechless. And white socialite Skeeter has just returned from college with ambition and a degree but, to her mother's lament, no husband. Normally Skeeter would find solace in Constantine, the beloved maid who raised her, but Constantine has inexplicably disappeared. Together, these seemingly different women join to work on a project that could forever alter their destinies and the life of a small town-to write, in secret, a tell-all book about what it's really like to work as a black maid in the white homes of the South. Despite the terrible risks they will have to take, and the sometimes humorous boundaries they will have to cross, these three women unite with one intention: hope for a better day.

The Help is one of the most beautiful books I think I've ever read! If it's not yet on the reading material list for schools, it should be! This book made me feel; it made me laugh, cry, and learn how to see us as "just two people". Kathryn Stockett's, The Help is amazing, rich and heartfelt. Its a story about deep love, growing, looking past the hatred and seeing people for who they really are. This is a book I will never forget!

There are so many things I loved about the book but my favorite are these;

Skeeter is writing the stories of the maids, She gets to Faye Belle's story. "Her stories unfold like soft linen. She remembers hiding in the steamer trunk with a little white girl while Yankee soldiers stomped through the house. Twenty years ago, she held that same white girl, by then an old woman, in her arms while she died. Each proclaimed their love as best friends. Swore that death could not change this. That color mean nothing. The white woman's grandson still pays Faye Belle's rent. When she's feeling strong, Faye Belle sometimes goes over and cleans up his kitchen."

Abileen is telling Mae Mobley one of her "secret stories". "We go in her room, where we like to set. I get up in the big chair and she get up on me and smile, bounce a little. Tell me, tell me about the brown wrapping. And the present. She so excited, she squirming. She has to jump off my lap, squirm a little to get it out. Then she crawl back up. That's her favorite story cause when I tell it, she get two presents. I take the brown wrapping from my piggly wiggly grocery bag and wrap up a little something, like a peice of candy, inside. Then I use the white paper from my Cole's drug store bag and wrap another one just like it. She take it real serious, the unwrapping, letting me tell the story bout how it ain't the color a the wrapping that count, it's what we is inside. "

Florida DMV and Family Time

We are home again, after spending our long weekend in Jacksonville visiting my in-laws and trying to get our Florida drivers licenses back. Hubby was able to get his, I on the other hand am a different story... apparently Florida no longer takes just a copy of your birth certificate... no, they need the real deal. Mine also is not that easy to get either, since its an "American born abroad" certificate :( I actually have to go to immigration to get a copy of it, I also have to have proof of when I entered the country 24 years ago! I know... WTF! That's what I said too... so I guess I am stuck with a Mississippi drivers license for a while longer. Booooo! On the more positive side, the whole weekend was not a total loss. We did get to go visit hubby's Grandma, it was her birthday and she turned 86, she's only 5 years younger than my gram. It was also nice that hubby got to see ALL of his uncles & aunts (even the ones that had to come from Ashville, NC) before he will leave at that *uncertain* time and date ;) We had good food, and great people to spend the day with and even though it rained pretty much all day we still had an excellent time! I am glad to be home now, though... I've got a ton of laundry to do and stuff around the house to catch up on. I love going home to Florida but, I sure do hate driving it! It feels like it takes forever! Oh and Ace did GREAT on his first long car tip, not even a peep out of him! I was so thrilled! :D

School Pictures & Crusin at the Elementry School

First things first... I just have to get this out there, its been bugging me all morning... Today is picture day at the munchkin's school and I have been stressing out since yesterday about how its going to turn out. I don't think I would care as much in the next few years as apposed to this year, its Kindergarten... your first year at school, your first year "rolling with the big kids" as she likes to call it LOL! Last night after her shower, I did her hair up and sprayed it with a CRAP-TON of hair spray so it would stay in place, this morning I got lucky and was still pretty perfect... it just needed a few touch up sprays and we were good to go. I kept fussing over breakfast, making sure she wasn't going to spill anything on her shirt before school started. And then the whole way there, I'm saying my mantra to her... "Don't get dirty, don't put anything on your hair, leave your hair clip in, and please don't spill anything on your shirt!" I am hoping to god, they took the Kindergartener's first to get the pictures done, because I fear the smaller they are the harder it is to keep them looking spectacular as the day wears on. I am still panicking... I want these pictures to look decent, since I'll be sending them out in the Christmas cards this year... in a really weird way, its kinda funny... I now know exactly how my mother felt on picture day... Lord knows how my pictures turned out! Awwwwwwweful! I think most of the time they took them either right after lunch or right after P.E! There was even this one time... (mom dressed me in a really pretty pink dress) and I decided I wanted to wear my best friends cowboy hat in the picture... my mom got the pictures about a month after the school took them and threw a huge cow! LOL! I never did tell her about wearing the cowboy hat on picture day... hence the shock LOL! I have this really scarey sensation that karma (or my momma's revenge) is about to bite me in the ass today... LOL!

Yesterday was "Cruisen on the Coast" at the munchkin's school. It was AWESOME! Some of us parents put on a little car show for the kids, they had two 1920's hot rods there, a 1930's ford, an old truck, an Elcamino, a new Corvette and of course my hubby's 1992 Corvette. Cruisen the coast is something they do down here in Biloxi every year, people from all over the country come down with their cool vintage cars and they ride them up and down our beach for a whole week. They have shows, and contests and its basically a huge party... think... Bike Week at Daytona Florida... Sadly we will be out of town starting Thursday and Friday is when the whole shebang kicks off... but if you want to see what its like... here's my post from last year.

We didn't tell the munchkin that Daddy was bringing the car up there, she didn't have a clue they were even doing this. The munchkin's teacher's daughter just happens to be a wiz on the sewing machine and she sewed ALL the girls in her class a poodle skirt! Awwwwe! She also made attachable "Elvis Chops" for the boys, you just clip them on with Velcro to sunglasses! I took pictures because they looked amazingly adorable!

The lady in red, is munchkin's teacher... she owns that 1930's ford and she drove it to school that morning!


Just look at those adorable poodle skirts!

As the kids walk around the vette, the munchkin screams "Hey! That's my daddy's race car!"
Then finally she saw us! LOL

The munchkin and her kindergarten class posing for a picture for me.
That cutie patootie in the front row showing off his muscles is the one I think she has a crush on... but his daddy drives a mustang so it's just not gonna work out LOL!

And of course my adorable little mini me :)

Proud Momma to a Girl Scout Daisy!

That's right! We've joined Girl Scouts! Munchkin is enrolled as a Daisy, and I couldn't be more happy! I was a Girl Scout myself after all... With the hub's big "D" coming up... I figure we could use all the distraction we can get for while he will be gone. Plus, Girl Scouts is a lot of fun... ok, ok... I'm really in it for the cookies LMAO! Just kidding! ;)


Munchkin had her first meeting last Thursday, she learned the girl scout promise and the friendship circle song and also got to work on her first flower petal patch! I was glad that her uniform made it in time for her first meeting! She was so proud to wear it, I pretty much had to hog tie her and peel it off when we came home!

Here's some pics of my proud little Daisy! Can't wait to start earning some patches!

On my honor... :)

And just for the fun of it... a old picture of myself (1991) in Girl Scouts. Can you find me?...
I'm in the first row...
All the way to the left. My momma's in the back row, she was our leader :)

And what Girl Scout journey isn't complete without a an adventure to camp!
Camp Caloosa (1993)

And Camp Chanyatah! Which was always my favorite! (1995) :)

I can't wait to go camping with the munchkin! :D

Weekend Update

Holy Moly! Sorry for my absence! We've been busy! I apologize now for any misspelling or grammar mistakes, because I have broken my thumb and that makes it really hard on me to type with. Last week I was going up to the school to pick up the munchkin and it was beginning to rain, I got out of the car to grab the umbrella from the trunk and my jacket got hung up with the seatbelt and the car door, I turned around to try and get it out before the door shut but the gust of wind blew it shut as my thumb was still on the edge of the door frame; therefor smashing it to death lol. At first I didn't think I broke it, but after an hour of pain so bad I wanted to throw up from, and a cold numbness set in, I finally went to the ER to have it checked out, and sure enough... broken. So I have it in a brace for about 4-6 weeks. :(


In other news, we are currently back to the drawing board on the baby making at least for the next few months and then we will have to take a little hiatus... we just got the news that hubby has the dreaded "D" come up.... we knew it was bound to happen but I just hoped it wouldn't as of course it puts a chink in our baby chain... *sigh* but that is our life...

Yesterday was our "date night", we went the casino's and played a little in the slot machines. Hubby ended up tripling his money and I doubled mine, the we went the another casino to try their slots and ended up losing a little, we still walked away with a little bit though and that is always good. All in all we had a fabulous night, just the two of us. :)

I'll be on a little vacation this week from Thursday-Monday. We are taking advantage of our long weekend and her fall break from school and going to Florida to my in-laws. So if you don't hear from me... that is why. :) Hope you all are having a fabulous weekend, I know we are with our 70 degree weather! :)