Happy Halloween!

Good evening to everyone!

The last week has been a lot of fun. The girls have been anticipating carving pumpkins, a friends birthday, the neighborhood fall festival, and of course trick-or-treating. I have uploaded all of the pictures from the weeks fun.
Carving pumpkins was pretty comical this year. The girls cleaned out their pumpkins this year. Elizabeth dove right in with out hesitation. Katherine was determined to use the little plastic pumpkin scraper to remove the seeds one at a time. Finally, when I got her to stick her hand in and grab some the response was priceless. I got the wrinkled nose look and an immediate request for a paper towel to clean her hands. Once the pumpkins were clean, Dennis & I did the carving. The patterns were picked out by the girls. Katherine chose a goofy looking mummy (I carved) and Elizabeth chose an owl (Dennis carved). They both turned out quite nicely.

Another reason why Elizabeth was eager to clean out her pumpkin was because we were going to keep the seeds and toast them. They turned out quite nicely and the girls have been enjoying them every day since. I do believe that will become a yearly tradition from here on out.

Halloween day was quite busy for our household. We had a birthday party in the early afternoon. One of Elizabeth's closest friends has a birthday on Halloween and the kids had a great time celebrating with him. Then there was only a few hours before our neighborhood fall festival. Katherine ended up crashing out for a nap about the time it was starting. Dennis & Elizabeth attended while I stayed home with sleeping beauty. No sooner did they get home did we have to start to get ready to head out for trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.





























We snapped a few pictures and then headed out to meet up with neighbors and friends. There are a couple of families that we have trick-or-treated with for a couple of years now. The kids are becoming such pros at this. As always, we had a great time and the kids were all worn out.

When we returned home we had enough time to turn on our lights and decorations and had out a little candy. We received several compliments on our decorations and even had a few little ones that were very reluctant to approach. I'm sure it had nothing to do with glowing skeletons, thunder and lightning strobe light and sound effects, spooky floating ghost or the huge spider web. There are a few pictures of the decorations in the pictures I've uploaded (see link at beginning of this post). Elizabeth really enjoyed handing out candy, too.

I am certain that we will all sleep quite well tonight.....too bad tomorrow is a school and work day.

If You Take a Mouse to the Movies

On Saturday, December 5th, we took the girls to uptown to the Children's Theater to their first play. We went with another family, the Callinan's (who were our sledding buddies earlier this year). Originally, we had planned to take the Lynx (train) uptown and then walk to dinner afterwards. There was a possibility of wintery mix and at best very cold temperatures with rain so we opted out on the train ride. The bad thing was that there was an accident on the freeway there so it took longer than expected to drive uptown.


Elizabeth C. and I waited in line to get into the theater while the guys kept the kids entertained in the play area. If we would have known that Santa was making an appearance there we would have arrived a little earlier so that we could have the kids pictures taken with him. It was nice that the kids got to get a little energy out of their systems before the show.

The play that we took them to was If You Take A Mouse to the Movies. It is part of an entire series of books that Elizabeth has absolutely adored. I believe the first Laura Numeroff book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Elizabeth received in a Chick-fil-a kids meal. Can you believe that? She wore that poor book out and easily had the entire thing memorized. We've since purchased a new copy and moved on to the moose/muffin, pig/party, pig/pancake, the cat/cupcake, mouse/school, best mouse cookie and of course mouse/movie. Yes, we have pretty much every book that follows this similar fun story. We are always looking forward to the next book written by Laura Numeroff.

Elizabeth C. (the other Mommy) and I were very curious to see how they were going to make this cute story into a play. It was amazing to see how they tied things together and changed the backdrop of the scenes in the book so effortlessly. The kids all laughed on cue at all the right parts. Almost everyone even sat tight for the majority of the movie. About 10 minutes before the end, Katherine started to get a little restless, but after a quick trip out to the lobby she straightened up and sat through the last part of the show.

It seemed like everyone had similar after show plans. Elizabeth C. thought that they might so she called ahead and make us reservations a pizza place just around the corner from the theater. The place was definitely packed with many of the families that had just attended the play. The kids all colored nicely and ate great. It was a lot of fun and I hope that we'll get to take them to a few more plays over the next year.

You can check out more pictures here.

Halloween Fun

We made our normal trip the a local pumpkin patch. We had a great time looking at all of the different pumpkin. We ended up with two large, two small, and two tiny pumpkins. With the girls help in picking out the patterns, we carved the two large pumpkins. We had a great time.

This year Elizabeth really challenged us with her costume request. She declared and stuck to the idea that she was going to be Eve from the movie Wall-E. Eve us the white girl robot from the movie. After many hours searching online, I finally came to the conclusion that I was going to have to make this costume. Thankfully, other parents had posted online some great ideas for making the costume. We were able to take those ideas and modify them to make Elizabeth's costume. Dennis did all of the cutting and I did the assembling. We added a green glow stick behind the leaf symbol and blue glow stick necklaces around the contrail to make it more like the character from the movie. I think it turned out pretty good.

Katherine's costume request posed a few problems as well. She was determined to be princess Ariel. Unfortunately, all of the 2T sizes were more like ballerina Ariel, which was not Ariel at all in her opinion. One of my friends finally suggested that I check the Disney store. Sure enough the XXS was perfect fit for her and they were on sale. We got her the matching light up shoes (which she'll be growing into), crown, and light up wand. She was the perfect little Ariel princess.

We were almost rained out on the big trick-or-treating night. We had to delay our start time by 30-45 minutes to let a rain storm pass by. We figured we had only an hour before it started to pour rain again. We went out with a couple of other families in our neighborhood. The kids had a blast. Elizabeth's costume proved to be a little difficult to walk in and that tuckered her out pretty quick. Once we were done, we handed out candy and the girls enjoyed seeing the other kids in their costumes.

(Check out additional pictures here.

SNOW DAY!?

It was kind of surprising to have a snow day today. There was hardly a dusting of snow in our area, but the rule is that if Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools are closed so is the preschool. That was the case today. We started out yesterday with the potential of 1-2" then it was 2-5" and possibly up to 8". By the 11 o'clock news we were back down to 1-2" of accumulation anticipated. We ended up with maybe a 1/4" of snow. That certainly did not stop the excitement around our house. I could hardly sleep last night because I was so excited about seeing the snow. Elizabeth was bouncing off the walls with excitement when she saw it this morning.

We finally bundled up and headed out when our friends, theadf Callinans, stopped by on their walk. They came in and warmed up while I got the girls in their snow clothes. They were all so cute all bundled up. Both Katherine and Aiden had a little trouble with mobility. Aiden kept falling after a few steps and couldn't get up and Katherine could get around, but had a difficult time getting back up when she did fall down. Elizabeth will certainly not get lost in her bright snowsuit!

We pulled out one of the new sleds we bought the night before and Kevin pulled the kids around the yard. He certainly got his exercise. Everyone giggled and laughed, except for Aiden who wasn't to sure about sledding. Elizabeth laid down a couple of times attempting to make a snow angel. No luck this time, but it was good practice for next weekend when we go to the mountains with the Callinans. I can hardly wait for the weekend now!