Favorite Halloween Candy!

Howdy!

This post was inspired by a fellow blogger friend of mine, Missamrunaway and her blog post ideas for autumn! We are getting ever so closer to one of my favorite holidays: HALLOWEEN! I’ll be honest I loved Halloween as a kid and I love it as an adult, but hated it as a teenager and that was probably because when you’re a teenager you think you’re too old to dress up and go around your neighborhood asking for candy. When I was 21 though, I snapped right out of that and somehow convinced my mom to let us go around our grandparent’s neighborhood as it’s kind of out in the open. I think my mom kind of got a kick of the fact that her daughters wanted to dress up and go trick or treating again. I was a punky ballerina and Blondie was a witch. We walked around with our cousin Kristi too and we all managed to come home with a fairly good amount of candy for all four of us!

I don’t remember going out a lot, because our Halloweens have always been really cold! One year, we lived out along the road with barely any neighbors and it was also pouring down rain that night too, so our mom came up with this idea. She knew how bad we wanted to have candy, so she decided to take an idea from our Easter traditions like hiding the eggs for us to find, but instead of finding painted eggs we had to find the candy that was hidden in our living room. Surprisingly I enjoyed this a lot better because I was always so shy to go up to somebody’s door and say trick or treat. This only lasted for one year but I thought it was pretty clever for my mom to come up with it.

I’m getting a little off subject.. I happen to like a LOT of different candies. I’m a little bit like my dad in a way because I love a lot more fruity/sour candies like he does, but my true love is basically chocolate! I’m going to list everything from favorite to least favorite.

Nestle’s Crunch Bar
I’ve always loved a good crunch bar. From a young kid, we’d get those lunchables from the store and I always the fact that inside the pizza ones there wa a bite size crunch bar. It was hard as a rock, but it was delicious!

Dum Dum Pops
I love suckers! Especially these types of suckers. When my sister and I were kids and would sit in the backseat while our mom and nana would go to the bank, they’d give us each a sucker! We lived for these days I swear! My favorite flavors are: cherry, watermelon, orange, Club Soda, raspberry, and sour apple!

Creme Savers 

I came across these a long time ago!! I’ve never been a big fan of the flavor strawberry and cream together. However, either they had a commercial with these babies and I decided to go for it, but I think I think somebody else must’ve shared one with me and ever since I was a little obsessed! I’ve tried to get my mom to find them on CVS a few times over the years but I don’t think anybody sells them anymore.

Trolli Sour Gummi Worms
I love both kinds of gummi worms, but I think the sour ones are my ultimate favorite! I remember getting them as part of my birthday present from one of my favorite evening nurses at Shriner’s and I’ve never been able to get them for my birthday, at least I don’t think so!

Smarties
These are another childhood favorite that I don’t think I’ll ever grow out of, they’re soft and suble. They’re weren’t sour or too sweet, just perfect the way they are.

Hershey’s Kisses:
This is another childhood favorite of mine, but I’d rather have the dark chocolate than the milk chocolate. Blame it on my papaw! It’s his fault, he’s the one that converted me. If I remember correctly he’s also the one that introduced us to the Kisses too! I could be wrong though!

Jolly Ranchers
My dad and I are a big of both life savers and jolly ranchers. I think it’s because they’re a little bit more sour and since their rectangle shaped they kind of last a little bit longer too!

Kit Kat
I am such a fan of Kit Kat’s. I the soft crunch of it the most. I don’t really remember how my love for it started but it might have something to do with as kids my mom would steal all of the Reece’s out of our bags before we even got a chance to eat one and Kit Kat’s were the next best thing?

Starburst
This is another favorite between my dad and I. This is also my go-to while we’re at the theaters! My favorite flavors are cherry, raspberry and lemon!

Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups
I do love Reece’s. I can’t have a bunch of them because there’s chance my mother will steal the bag! I love the whole thing of peanut butter and chocolate together, it’s amazing!

Twix
I love Twix, this was another alternative of a Snickers because I can no longer have those. I actually love the cookie underneath chocolate and caramel. I recently tried the peanut butter one and I have to say, the production company ruined the candy bar! It’s disgusting!

York
I’ll be honest, I haven’t had one of these in a long time but they’re still good. This is another favorite flavor combination of mine: chocolate and mint. This one was started my grandparents on my dad’s side.

M&M’s
I like M&M’s, but mostly the mini’s and I recently tried the crispy kind. It’s like they have a mini version of a rice krispy treat inside of them! I think those were better than any other kind! Except maybe the mint ones!

Ferrero Rocher
These are dangerous little beasts! I had these for the first time either last winter or the year before. One of the women my mom works with offered a three pack to us and I decided to take them. She fed me the first two and OMG! It was so amazing! I really like hazelnuts and chocolate together. I really need to get a package of them soon!

Butterfinger Bites
Do they still make these? I remember the late 90’s I was obsessed with these! And then they messed with the recipe and I’ve had a hard time finding that love for them again.

What is your favorite candy as a kid and/or adult?

Geeky Weekend

Well, if you read my post on Friday, you know how I’ve been feeling “weird” lately and how much stress I shouldn’t be under at this moment. All last week I was watching so much TV that I literally thought something was really wrong with me, like sick wise. I’m always online or listening to music. We have lots of different music channels on our TV’s and I’ve usually got mine on The Pulse or Venus. A birthday cake that my dad went and got Blondie on Friday or Thursday, I don’t remember. It was a nice, moist chocolate cake (I swore it had mint or cinnamon in it too) it was covered in lightly whipped frosting with yellow, green, and a very light-colored orange edge design. I watch WAY too many sweet specials on TV! This was before my sister and I basically tore into it.

Saturday:

I’ve known that my parents were going to go out Saturday, as a chance to escape for a bit. Blondie would be “babysitting” me in a way. Since this has been her birthday weekend, her boyfriend Batman is down for it. She’s been very happy! So has ChiChi too! I was told earlier in the week that my mom was going to get me an iTunes card as a way of my mom being sorry for leaving me at home with the twins. I have so many nicknames for these two I swear! Anyways, I started to think about later on in the week that since I’ve been watching movies a lot lately, that maybe I could talk her into going to the video store instead. Well, I woke up at like 6am and I never went back to sleep like I had hoped after my dad caught me on the laptop just before the sun came up, but before he came in I went through my DVR to find something to watch. I went on the Living Room DVR and I found the best thing ever. My mom found Captain America: The Winter Soldier on our demand! It was AWESOME by the way! Lots of fighting and stunts! Still mad that Hydra is back! Boo to the bad guys!

My mom and dad left the house to go to a bike show. The twins were in the living room and I decided that once they were gone that I was going on the floor. It’s been a while since I’ve scoot into the living room, my mom has trouble getting up off the floor so I usually wait whenever Blondie’s around. Poor girl. Thank god she’s gone back to lifting weights again though! I went into the living room to watch poor Batman get lovings from ChiChi, who might still be in heat. My parents were watching Two And a Half Men just before they left, I thought it was a taped thing. So when I realized that the first Star Trek movie was on I was ecstatic! I haven’t actually watched the first movie all the way through before. I’m in love with the second movie and the story line between Spock and his fallen planet definitely makes sense to me now! I also got WAY too excited when I saw Scotty and Bones. While I was on the floor, my feet were getting SO cold! I forgot to bring my socks with me. I think Batman and I got through half of the movie before I had to go back into my room. I did change the channel number and when i went back into my room, I tried to continue but I couldn’t so I taped it. I finished the film two hours after it originally ended.

Of course, with all this fun of watching films and being around my sister and her boyfriend. I have been doing my usual crap that I do on a daily basis. Go online for a couple of hours, listen to music, watch YouTube videos (which has now become an obsession!) and fight the temptation to fall asleep in the middle of the day. I decided to take a chance on Little Mix again. They may or may not make it to my Tune Tuesday posts sometime next month! I’m taking baby steps to listening to their album, Salute all the way through. I’ve also went on a weird hunt of Brits trying American candy. Oh my gosh, I’ve never enjoyed anything more than seeing their reactions! I was actually telling my mom about Alfie Deyes (PointlessBlog)’s video of trying different sweets from here in the US. I’m pretty sure she thought I was losing my mind as I was telling her about it on our way to the dentist. Something that I thought was interesting was the Jolly Rancher soda he and Zoe tried, here’s a fun fact I didn’t know it was an American thing! I thought it was a UK thing because my friend Stacie, who lives in England was the one who introduced me to it first! I actually saw it a week before Christmas, while we were out shopping, I wanted to take a picture of it and send it to the Facebook for her. I didn’t, so when I saw it again on the video I was very amazed.

Sunday:

I didn’t exactly wake up as early as Saturday morning, but I certainly didn’t sleep in as much as my dad would have liked me to apparently. I woke up to darkness even though it was 10am. The sun was gone and the pain in my lower started to make sense! I’ve been having some weird pain from the middle to lower parts of my back. The only way I can describe it as if I said it feels like if you were to twist a rag like three times to drain water out of it with all of your strength, that’s what I woke up to! I’m happy to say as the day went on, the pain kept fading away. I refuse to take medicine unless it’s like spasms and it wasn’t. Saturday, I saw this ad on Facebook, it was about a live broadcast of Ed Sheeran’s concert as part of VH1’s Storytellers edition. It was on at 7pm EST and I have been really loving “X” album a lot. So I scheduled it to record on my DVR and when I woke up Sunday morning, I couldn’t contain myself anymore. I had to watch it and it was sooo freaking good! I really need to learn the words to these songs I swear! I only know “Don’t” is that bad?

I charged up my iPod in the afternoon, and I usually sit up and listen to music through my Spotify, but not this time. I kept switching back and forth to different music channels. I think my love for pop music might be deflating again. It happens. Sometimes I go on sprees of just listening to the same pop songs over and over again and then after a couple of months, I get annoyed with it and I stop completely. In a way, it might be a good thing because any song that I can’t stand to hear right now, I might like it again later. My mom said a few days ago that one of her residents had the flu. She and dad have been sneezing and coughing for the past week, I’ve been doing it too but not as much she was supposed to be working but called in because it has officially came to our house.

Blondie and Batman went to a basketball game and never quite came back to the house afterwards. They went back to her dorm and slept there, which seems like an odd thing to do considering our house is closer. Batman went back home early this morning and instead of just staying at her dorm for the rest of the day, like maybe she should’ve, she came home and spend the day in her room with probably ChiChi figuring out her new phone. Batman got her the iPhone 6 and she’s not doing well with her autocorrect and I’ve got the text messages to prove it! She might want to be happy that I don’t have a smartphone like everybody else though! By late afternoon, I’d been smelling something that was being deep-fried and I’m not going to lie when I say I was freaking happy! I love anything my dad makes fried! A few months ago, I had a serious craving for Buffalo Chicken wings, and within an hour after discovering the second layer of smells dad comes bringing in a plate full of them covered in ranch just in time for the lifestyle blogger chat on Twitter. I should’ve seen it coming I swear! I didn’t fight it though, they were so good!.

Here is the video that I watched. It’s pretty hilarious! I’m not afraid to say I’ve watched three or four other videos like it.

Perfect Stocking Stuffers Under $20 From Wal-Mart

I’ve been looking on other blog sites to try to draw inspiration with their Christmas or “Blogmas” posts. I decided to opt out of writing every day in December since in the colder months, I find myself slowly getting into the whole Christmas spirit. Anyways, while drawing some inspiration, I’ve had it between writing my favorite Christmas sweaters or what were the perfect stocking stuffers this year. I decided on the stuffers as I thought would be fairly fun thinking of others and what would be cheap. So I found all these items shown above from Wal-Mart and they’re all under $20! I also decided to draw some inspiration from my friends what would be perfect stocking stuffers too! I even went to as far to asking my dad what his favorite gift he got in his stocking as a kid was, he didn’t remember. He wasn’t much fun.My mom said she used to get apples and oranges, now at first I thought this was a term of a game, but nope, they were actual apples, oranges and grapefruits inside their stockings! My grandparents did this once or twice when we were younger too! I had a lot of answers my Facebook and that helped out a lot too!

Everybody has a few common answers: candy, lotions and socks! Not very many people said gift cards. I think my favorite answers were candles, scratch off tickets, and my Uncle David always has to be included in some fashion. His answer was pizza. Unless somebody has put pizza rolls inside his stocking then I could see it being done but I know he was just kidding around! Anyways, I remember in my stockings growing up, especially teenagers years til now. CDs, movies, and candy were the biggest hits with us! You could always tell my dad got something for me because he knows what kind of candy we each like the most. He used to get me the bubblicious brand of gum. He knows how much I love the good stuff to blow those giant bubbles. He always agreed with me when it came to that stuff being the best and I’d get a couple of packets every year at Christmas time.

Now back to the items above! It was kind of difficult to find something for every age and both genders. At one point I had started off looking for something small enough to fit inside a fairly medium size stocking, but by the third thing I found I realized that the next one wouldn’t fit into a stocking even if you shoved it as far back as possible, it just wasn’t going to fit. This item was a Olaf toy that sang “In Summer” if you squeezed his nose or something. Realistically, this would not fit inside a normal stocking. So out that one went and I got back on track, but I still think it was a terrific gift and it was also under $20 too! I selected items that were both a want and need in everyday life. So the watch and clutch/wallet would be on the “need” and the rest is on the “want” as what a normal child or teenager would want to get for Christmas. Of course, if it came in what your child likes the most, you should get it in what they like and not what I like. I selected in familiar brands that I like and what I think is “popular” since I don’t know all the trends very well, I went with my gut on parts. All items above I’m including links if you wanted to order online or not. Just to make things easier on you! Click each item to bring up the link!

1. The Vampire Diaries – Season One ($12.96)
2. Leopard Cellphone Pouch ($3.00)
3. Disney’s Frozen Movie Soundtrack ($10.00)
4. Hershey’s Kiss Sliver Necklace ($20.00 and this was the cheapest one!!)
5. Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles Lip Balm ($4.88)
6. My Little Pony Body Shimmer Gift Set ($5.00)
7. Men’s Digital Watch ($14.99)
8. Peppermint Holiday Candy Canes ($2.48)

What A Celebration!

Hello!

This week has been a very interesting one as whenever you have things planned things can array and that’s what happened, my mom has her work schedule changed twice in the week, first she was wasn’t working on today (Saturday) and well, now she is. We’ve had to rearrange everything around and lucky for everybody I was willing to go with the flow with no complaints. I’ve kind of always wanted to celebrate my birthday on Halloween and this year I actually got to do that. Another part of our original plan was to go to Steak N Shake in Vincennes and eat there for my birthday, but we found out earlier in the week that they wouldn’t open until next week. So we ended up going to the second post and we got to do the buffet at Ponderosa. It was my parents, Blondie and her boyfriend, something else that was different from the past years was this was the first year that I got to eat by myself, I’ve always had somebody feed me, but we took the push wheelchair and it was much shorter than my big chair, so I got to it all myself even eat ice cream!

After we left, I sat in the backseat with the push chair, which was weird. The day was pretty windy and gloomy. It never rain or anything, but the cold wind was NOT the best thing. Halfway through the drive home, I was busy watching the pretty autumn overview as we were driving home. So I finally asked my mom how good her camera was while the car was in motion. She, of course said that she didn’t know and then she asked if I wanted to some pictures of the trees and everything around, I said yeah. She was REALLY getting into it. I kept seeing her try to reach out a bit to get a better picture. I kept wondering what my dad was thinking while she was busy doing it. When we got home, my mom took a nap and I laid on my bed trying to relax a bit, after fifteen minutes I sat up and started editing my pictures. When she got up, she took me to my nana’s and she made me dark chocolate cupcakes. My papaw had told us when we first got inside the house that he’d had two of them already, but only had the second because he dropped the first one on the floor! He rat on himself! It was hilarious! I only got to eat one cupcake but it was okay because my nana and I kept talking amongst each other. It was okay, after that I stayed at home for a couple more hours until the last part of the night begin.

The last part of the day and the beginning of the night, started out simple and absolutely hilarious for my mom. Now, we were supposed to go out trick-or-treating, but since it was too damn cold and really windy outside, it ended up being a no-go. Which was okay, because while my mom was out doing my nana’s errands she got a bunch of candy. We also decided to dress up anyways. We waited until the last minute to find anything and Sammy and her mom had quite a bit of different costumes you could do the last minute. Somebody had suggested that I could go as somebody in an electric chair because since I have an electric (wheel)chair, we could find a belt and something else to put on my head. My mom got really into it. Unfortunately, I don’t have very many white clothes, but we did find this one sweater that has black skulls in the front. My mom had this bright idea of putting it on backwards and tying the sleeves around to my back. My mom used one of her brown belts and put it around my arms, lastly we didn’t exactly know how to make the helmet or whatever. So we used my headband and get this my mom cut part of the cat food bag and cut a circle of it and put underneath my headband. It actually ended up being pretty good. An hour of being in the barn, seeing Sammy and Tepe with their face make-up on, Sammy offered to put on some makeup on me too. She gave me a similar sugar skull design. I actually liked it a lot! A couple of their friends came over and we had some pretty cool pictures! Lots of fake blood, I was the only one that was tame.

The whole time, we sat by the heater in the barn. I kept eating candy that we brought from home. I swear I had like five or six different suckers, still haven’t had a Club Soda sucker yet. My favorites of the night were the Raspberry Lemonade and Peach Mango, that I never got to finish because I had that one while Sammy was doing my face makeup and I didn’t want to drive her insane with my sucker in my mouth, so I took it out and gave it to my mom to HOLD! She ate the stinking thing! Sammy and her mama, got me some really cool presents. I got a cute black skull garland and a pajama outfit of a skull shirt and light purple leopard fuzzy pants. The one thing I wasn’t expecting was the last gift of all that everybody knew and I didn’t. Sometimes I love/hate those kinds of surprises. Sammy and Theresa came inside and they surprised me with an awesome birthday cake, it was a light purple skull and it was a while cake around the face area, but the top of it was the most coolest part of the entire thing. She put a small layer of red velvet cake as a brain and she had red corn syrup dripping down the sides of the cake like blood. The green parts are coconut shavings, the little black “graves” at the sides are from crushed up chocolate graham crackers. It was amazing! I had never treated red velvet before and I’ve got to say eat it with coconut on it and it tastes really good. Sammy and I really enjoyed it! So did their outdoor cat Twitches too!

I also got a small little bag of those left over skulls on the right side, they weren’t edible. I’m going to have fun finding places for all these different skull stuff! I had a fun time over in the barn with everybody! Day Two was on my actual birthday. We celebrated it in the garage this time around. Our neighbors just a got a new pool table. So everybody was interested in playing it for the first time! We went over there, dad made his famous pork chops, somebody made this really good sweet baked beans, it had like three different kinds of beans. Ju-Ju also made a good batch of corn on the cob and basically soaked it with butter. I had two corn cobs and it was delicious! I honestly had a great time over in the garage watching the guys play pool and all of us women were just talking up a storm. Going back home however was interesting because we were walking out in the dark and I remembered there was something on the side of the other garage and I could see an outline of something in front of me, so when I was trying to dodge it my mom was trying to get me to through it, it was difficult not to scream after that but I knew I was hitting something! That was my two days of my birthday celebration. I’m hoping on Monday or Tuesday, my mom will make me potato soup because I still haven’t had my birthday dinner yet.

I’d say this comfort food at its finest!

 

Happy Easter

I had fun yesterday spending time with family and friends for an early Easter celebration, I’ve turned into the quiet and supervisor of all activities like my Papaw, I’ve noticed this about three or four times. I look like I’m bored but I’m not I have a tendency of spacing out easily and I don’t usually get into things. I was basically around little Chevy and her Aunt Chey all evening. When I first got there, I had been thinking about corn on the comb for three days. Literally dreaming about it! I let dad put mom’s alcoholic slushie drink in her cup and then my mom went up and got the both of us one. I’m not that big of a corn lover, but when I get a craving for something it needs to be met and I devoured it too! I didn’t have any butter in it because mom didn’t think we needed it. We didn’t but mine needed something on it, but it didn’t stop me from eating every part of it. It was so good!

After that mom fed me mashed potatoes and then when that was in my belly I had some pineapple upside down cake. I’ve never had that before but I have baked it with my sister and my nana once. I’m pretty sure Theresa converted me to it. I had it twice last night and I have no regrets. Plus two little Krabby Patty’s gummies. One was in an egg and the other was in the Pinata. I didn’t do the egg hunt but I watched Chey and Chevy try to look for all 42 eggs. Once Chevy got the hang of carrying the box (and I say “box” because they didn’t have a basket for them, so they used the next best thing–a beer box) it was a redneck Easter basket and it did what it was supposed to do too! I also had two little packages of M&M mini’s too! All I did there was smile, laugh and eat. One of the things that I was excited about was doing the Pinata. I have this small baseball bat I got when I was in middle school, it’s never been used before until yesterday and I’m surprised of how hard between Blondie and Sammy punched it, that didn’t break as well!

Originally, they were going to hang the Pinata in the barn but they couldn’t risk the bikers inside and so they used the back-end of an old truck and it had a little hole on the side of it, so Rex put it in there to hold it up and he and Marshall had to use their weight to level it down for Chevy, Chey-Chey, and I because we’re the shorter ones. They leveled back for Blondie and Sammy since they’re much taller. See how cute the little egg is! Chevy loved it too! She carried to “Pa” like it was her little purse, when we let her start swinging the bat Sammy tried to show her to swing with two hands but she didn’t want to go that route and everytime she went to hit the Pinata, you could hear her say in whisper “boom” she was giving herself some sound effects.

When it was my turn to try, I was bit weird because I had NEVER 1.) swung a bat before and 2.) the last time I played Pinata I was too afraid to “hurt” it so everybody else instead. So this was something different for me but I did it and had fun with it! Every time I had the bat in my toes I couldn’t get enough grip on it that after I hit it, that it would stay in between my toes. That part was difficult for me, so I switched it up and did something different. When you’re handicapped, sometimes you can’t go the traditional way, you have to do it in another way that’s good for you. My feet are pretty tough honestly and I have a bunch of bones on my left foot so I knew it would be THAT bad for it. So I gave up on the bat and I started using my left foot and it was a good stress reliever! I didn’t make a dent in it, but it do something else…

It did this… you probably can’t see it, which it wasn’t THAT bad but a little bit after, that whole area around those three bones was REALLY red but it never hurt or anything. Even last night, it wasn’t that bad either. Like I said, my foot’s pretty tough so something like this wouldn’t hurt that bad.

Blondie didn’t want to do it, but both mom and dad made her do it. She used to be in softball so we knew this would be kind of easy for her to do. However, she only went twice because after that second time the stick that was holding up the string and Pinata kind of came out of the truck and landed right on her and nobody had noticed it came out so this was probably taken afterwards because Rex is hanging onto it in this picture.

Sammy knocked ’em dead, the boys were supposed to go after her but we kind of figured they weren’t going to even go after Blondie or Sammy. I am too weak to break it open, Chey tried her hardest and Chevy tried too. When we saw the gashing big dent in the side of it, we all like “yup, it’s about to explode.” It did as soon as we noticed the dent, she only had to do one more swing before that candy inside went flying out of there! Packets of M&M’s and Krabby Patty’s everywhere on the ground. For once I actually grabbed a couple off the ground. For my first Pinata experience. I think it was a success!

I hope everybody has/had a wonderful Easter weekend! ♥