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.

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.

Trick-or-Treat

Halloween started off with a very interesting start. The picture above is what I was very shocked to see when I opened up the kitchen sink cabinet to get a bottle of glass cleaner. YIKES! (Yes, this is the actual spider. Yes, we spent quite some time taking pictures of it. Is you skin crawling yet?) I could tell it was dead right off so it didn't freak me out too much, but it was huge! I snapped a picture of it and sent it out to Dennis and my friends. A few folks thought that it might be a fake spider. I assure you it was not! Dennis and I spent a little time doing some Arachnid research and were able to determine by the number of and rows of eyes (3 rows with a total of 8 eyes) that it is a Wolf spider. They are actually venomous and if bitten you should seek medical attention. That is a little intimidating especially since we've now killed at least 3 more Wolf spiders of that size. I know it's not easy to really get a sense of how large it is from the picture. It's body is about 1 1/2 inches and probably a good 3 to 4 inches with it's legs extended. BIG!

We purchased our pumpkins early, but were late to get them decorated. The large pumpkin sat in our garage for too long and developed a bad spot on the back of it so we really couldn't carve it. All of us were sad about that. Elizabeth as usual wanted a cat on the pumpkin. I got the idea for the face from a very cute picture on a calendar. The girls painted their pumpkins and then I drew thew faces on them. Elizabeth's pumpkin cat face is, of course, the red one. I had fun drawing the faces on the pumpkins.

It was very chilly out, so we decided to head out around 6:30pm this year. I was surprised that it was still fairly light outside. We brought the umbrella stroller stacked with jackets, drinks, and snacks (also, just in case the little strawberry fairy decided she was done walking). Elizabeth got a great kick out of ringing the door bells and Katherine would have gladly invited herself into each house. Both loved saying "Trick-or-treat" and "Thank you!" Katherine would not hold her onto pink pumpkin for anything. After about the 3rd house she demanded to have her coat on. Our little black kitty cat had a blast! By the time we were half way down our street, Katherine was done and Elizabeth had been hitching a ride in the stroller for several houses, so we headed home. I think that next year they'll be begging us to walk the entire neighborhood.

This was the first year that we have not handed out candy. By the time we got home from our own trick-or-treating most of the kids in the neighborhood were done, too.