Happy Halloween!!!

Today was a lot of fun, and Ryan loved being dressed up all day long as Pablo the penguin from Backyardigans!

It was kinda nice to see him waddling around all day long as a penguin doing his normal activities

Kelly dressed up as a cat for Halloween as you can see. Once she got her makeup on and let out her poofy hair, Ryan got a bit scared. For the next hour while we were getting out little party ready he stayed behind the table wondering what had happened to his mommy...

Our little dinner party consisted of:

The full-time missionaries in Oulu

Kaspar as Michael Jackson

The Rotos and Sonja

And a great spread

The feature of the table was of course the melon that was spewing out yummy guacamole

Jacko-lantern and ghost cheeseburgers. Yes, they kinda remind me of the ghosts in pacman too

Yummy mummy dogs!

And of course, you can't go wrong with super sweet, caramel apples

The caramel apples were the hit of the night. Of course, we found out that the caramel here was a bit different than back home. It wouldn't stick to the apples. So, some people just melted the chocolate and made chocolate apples, and some of us had to basically use our hands and sculpt the apples with caramel. If you got the caramel around it would stick to itself and eventually cool and stay on the apple, but it would not just stick to the apple. So, after a bit of work, we all hard our own apples to eat.

We even got a family picture, our first one up here we realized! Thank goodness Ryan was smiling then, I guess he can't help it since he's had so much sugar

Ryan loves candy as you can see. After about 4 or 5 times of teaching him how to knock on a door and say trick or treat, he learned how to say his own version of it and was delighted that we, or should I say me at least, would give him candy whenever he said it. This got him a lot of free handouts from me in particular, but then he also learned to run to the kitchen when we were out of the room, and pull the candy dish over and start to gorge himself on whatever he could grab before we noticed he was chowing down on candy again. Silly kid.

Happy Halloween from the land of the Finns!

The Great Pumpkin

Ryan loves our "kukin" ("cu" like cup) so we thought he would really enjoy carving it with us last night. At first he seemed a little interested to see what was inside of his pumkin.

But he quickly decided he didn't want anything to do with the process of turning the pumpkin into a jack-o-lantern.

So that left me all alone (since Greg was watching Ryan) to hack away at our prized pumpkin with a steak knife since they don't sell pumpkin carving sets out here.

We love our "kukin". Not only does Ryan enjoy having his kukin around but now he gets to enjoy the seeds too (which surprisingly he does like!). We are so excited for Halloween tomorrow!

Baking Days Part 2

I had another fun day of baking Wednesday. The goal: Learn how to make rye bread. The end result: Success!! Rye bread is soo good. I wish we had it back home, but now I can make it when we get back, yay! Susa is the master of breads out here and I was lucky to have the master herself teach me :) It was a really fun morning hanging out with some of the Mäkila family.

Suoma and Me

Master of breads Susa with two of her lovely daughters.

Kaspar and Ryan wanted to get in on all the fun so they cut out some gingerbread dough to make cookies.


Ryan had a lot of fun cutting out the shapes. I thought how he placed them all next to each other was so cute.

Rye bread!

Thanks for the fun day Susa, Suoma and Sonja!

Baking Days Part 1

I have been busy these past week learning how to make lots of yummy Finnish treats! On Friday Mia and I spent the afternoon baking goodies with pulla. It's a really yummy dough that can be made into lots of different things. I had a lot of fun spending time with Mia, and as you can see the kids had a lot of fun together too :) They actually spent a lot of time jumping on the bed. Too bad I didn't get a picture of that. It was really cute.

My great teacher!

Since I never really have many pictures of myself I figured I'd add a few since I have them :) Here is a procession of me making Finnish cinnamon rolls with the pulla dough.

The end result, yummy! That is pearl sugar on top, not salt. It doesn't melt when you bake with it. Isn't that cool!? Anyone know if we have that in the States?

We also made some with a raka filling. Raka is like a mix between cream cheese and plain yogurt.

We also made this yummy and adorable blueberry pie. It looks as good as it tastes :) Doesn't it look festive?

We also made a pastry with apple pie like filling but I forgot to get a picture of it :( I'm totally going to make these yummy treats for Christmas. Thanks super teacher Mia! I had so much fun.

Fun in Finland

Daylight savings happened over the weekend and it is now dark before 5:00 p.m. and will continue to get darker and darker and darker... It has also been really cold so Ryan and I usually spend most of our time indoors now. Thank goodness for friends and primary! They do a great job keeping Ryan from going stir crazy. What keeps me from going too crazy in the cold? Digital books. Greg just found the sequel to The Hunger Games online so I got to read that. It was amazing! I love this series. I rank it just below Twilight, so if you Twilight fans are looking for something else to read you should get your hand on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. I also FINALLY read Pride and Prejudice. I've been in love with the story for a long time now and have never read the book. It's about time :)

We are really looking forward to Halloween this week. There isn't a lot of Halloween stuff up here but we are still having lots of fun getting things ready for the big day. Mia helped me find a pumpkin at one of the bigger grocery stores. I had like eight pumpkins to choose from, lol. We are going to have a fun Halloween dinner and I can't wait for Ryan to see his costume again. I know he has forgotten about it since we got it as soon as we found out we wouldn't be around for Halloween in Pittsburgh. We have been watching lots of Halloween shows to help Ryan understand the holiday better. Today Ryan recognized our pumpkin without me even telling him what it was! He saw it and was like "cukin, cukin!". Guess he is learning a lot from Sesame Street's Magical Halloween Adventure and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. :) It feels a little funny celebrating Halloween when I feel like it's actually Christmas time up here. They already have Christmas stuff out in some stores. Their holiday drinks, Glogi and Hehku, are out too. Yummy!

Just a few pictures from the last week or so.

Presenting the first collection of Ryan Jay Moody

About two weeks ago Ryan somehow grabbed the camera, turned it on and started snapping away. So without more introduction I present to you Ryan's first collection of photographs.

Boy with Finger

Boy sees World

Boy meets Maker

Beautiful Sundays

Just a few more pictures of downtown and what we get to see as we walk to church.