Trick-Or-Treat!

Happy First Day of November, everyone!

 

Seriously, November already? It feels like yesterday I was at someone's lake house in the grueling heat! Well, at least the heat part is still accurate. Seriously, Southern California weather, get the memo already! I know that some people who may read this (crickets, crickets) may be a bit jealous of that fact, but I've always been a girl in love with autumn. And boots and scarves and cardigans.

 

I figured I'd recap our Halloween fun! This is our second Halloween as a family of three and the end of all of our "first" holidays. It's bittersweet, but I'm glad we started off with a few established traditions, if only a year old. :)

 

Last year we had chili, so of course we had to have it again this year! We ate it while passing out candy to the millions of children in the neighborhood. This year my mom made it at her house and we brought that over along with some pumpkin and butterscotch cookie dough to bake in the oven at my house later. Of course this happened to be the day of catastrophies. When my mom was taking the chili out of the backseat, the box it was in gave way about half of what we made (for 8 people) dumped in the garage, on my car, and on my mom. She managed to bruise her toe quite impressively in the process, but I didn't even know that until she got home that night! Such a champ. :)

 

So, there was the chili disaster, but luckily still enough time to make more since we got to my house earlier enough. The next thing was that my oven decided to stop working. We have a double oven, which has proven quite convenient, especially when 12 girls come over expecting to use it. However, this past week it's been on the fritz. It'll beep a few times, turn off, and a few minutes later turn back on. I should probably look up the error code to see what's really wrong with it, but since it was turning back on I wasn't too concerned. Well, as I was preheating the oven for the cookies and for the mac and cheese that Michelle was bringing, it did it. Three times. Luckily we got it going to finish cooking the mac and cheese, but we didn't get to finish baking the cookies, which is always sad, especially since they were so yummy!

 

Oh, and Michelle somehow managed to set her hair on fire. That's my best friend, for ya, ladies and gentlemen!

 

Vampires with our baby bat last year!

 

Last year I made this awesome DIY photobooth from PVC pipe and a white sheet. I cut out bats, ghosts, and pumpkins and just taped them to the sheet for a fun backdrop. Since everything was done already, we busted it out this year! By this time last year we had only been in the house a month. Our front door is to the side of our house, so I thought it would be fun to camp out in the driveway and have the backdrop behind us. And if any trick-or-treaters wanted to take pictures in front of it, cool! (No one did, sad day.)

 

This year was more of the same! We had our favorite couples over: my mom and dad; our favorite family of three, Michelle, Ryan, and bestfriend James; and our favorite practically married couple, Annie and Scot! To kick it up a notch, the boys brought the firepit to the front side yard (I guess there is one perk of the tree being gone) and we camped out and ate the traditional chili (hooray)! We took pictures in front of the photobooth, which I desperately need to expand in all directions if we don't have something to sit on. And we went trick-or-treating!!

 

Waiting for the candy!

It was kind of weird going with babies who obviously don't eat candy. I just had a little felt bat bag from the Target dollar section, so I wasn't expecting much. We went around to show him off to the neighbors on our street and that was it, so I feel less bad. However in future years I'm sure we'll do something like the Switch Witch that Michelle was telling me about or sending it to troops overseas, since we kinda sorta maybe like military people. :)

 



Daddies with their boys!

Andrew knows the neighbors a lot better than I do because that's just the type of person he is. Plus he golfs with some of the guys about once a month. I finally got to meet a few more, aside from the two that I knew who were always busy with their kids' activities. It was nice to know that in an emergency situation I could at least know who's house to go to! :)

 

Lion tamer, little lion, and the ring leader!

On our trick-or-treat walk I noticed a few of the neighbors sitting outside this year... I was proud that we might have started a trend since we were the only ones to do it last year! It's just a lot more interactive that way, in my opinion. I know my dad loves to be the candy gatekeeper (never the hander-outer) and make the kids get more into the Halloween spirit. Annie and Scot were the candy dispensers, which was a perfect job! Now, let's see if anyone bonfires next year...

 

On to some pictures!

Owen with the clowns! Granddaddy and Gramsie matched our circus theme.

I just really like this picture of the two of them.

Walking around with Uncle Scot

Excited to go to bed




He's really signing "all done" in the above picture, but it looks like he's clapping so whatever! I finished his lion costume yesterday, of course, with enough time to spare for him to wear to visit my dad at his work. Every year the kids come in and they have an office pumpkin carving contest and fun in general. Every year we're like an hour late, as usual. But this time it's because Owen was napping!

 

Roar!

I had planned on building a pattern for the costume off of some pajamas, but I remembered that we had just bought him a jumper/onesie/thingy from Carter's that was fleecey. So I hand stitched the fabric and yarn to the fleece at the seems and around the zipper. It was daunting, which is probably why it took me so long.
 

Families of Three! Superheros and circus folk.

All-in-all Owen was pretty good. He's been a bit crabby lately because of his teeth (I found two more coming in), so he wasn't much for pictures. He looooved walking around door-to-door though, with us holding his hands, and playing with the candy in his bat bag. Luckily he's only attempted eating the candy, wrapper and all, a handful of times, but has been good to take it out when I tell him not to do that. I've been debating letting him try a 3 Musketeers or a Reese's but I really don't think I want to open those doors yet...
 

Quite the candy collection!

One of the best toys!

Bestfriend pre-lunch snack.

Ryan, Michelle, and James spent the night with us (yay)! After the boys went down we tried to find Hocus Pocus on TV since I had never seen it, but for whatever reason it wasn't on anywhere! It was awful. And I didn't really feel like driving to a RedBox to try and find it or pay $3 for it. It came on earlier tonight, so I'll probably watch it on Monday. So instead of that we ended up watching The People Under the Stairs. This is 1993 film at its best, folks. I'm totally kidding. It was one of those "I can't stop watching, but I know I'm wasting 2 hours of my life" movies. Of course Andrew was out before we even settled on a movie. Michelle managed to survive that, but tuned out when we started watching Jeepers Creepers 2. Can't say I blame her for that. Ryan and I called it a night after about an hour of it.

I'm always so happy when we have sleep overs at the house (hint, hint) because we always have the best breakfasts the next morning! We've been really into waffles when this happens, so we had waffles, eggs, and the best bacon ever. Luckily both boys were in bed, so we got to fully enjoy breakfast without needing to tear up waffles or making sure no one throws their plate overboard.

While the boys were napping, Michelle and I took advantage and headed over to Target to try and score some Halloween discounts, which we did! Of course both of them were up when we got home (sorry, Daddies!) so we got ready to head out to lunch before they left for home. It was such a fun way to end the Halloween festivities and bring in November!

And sorry this is super lengthy... I know no one probably cares about all of these details, but I do and it's my blog! I really started this as a way to remember things anyways and I'm a fairly detail-oriented person, so you're just gonna have to deal with it. I'm sure I'll get better about it eventually. :) Until then...