This year for Halloween we took it easy! We had gotten a big pile of pumpkins from Josie’s school’s harvest festival. We took two of them to Sharona and Jeremy’s pumpkin carving party where the girls helped Jordi carve and decorate them. We didn’t even carve the big huge pumpkin, time just gets away from us these days as we try to keep everyone fed, sleeping enough, clothed and moderately happy. Another year we’ll get there. The girls were more active this year for carving at least. They even had previous practice hollowing one out when we cooked our own sugar pumpkin this year.

We also kicked off the Halloween week with a fun get together with some of my mom friends from the baby group I was a part of when Josie was born. Our number of families has dwindled but the number of kids has grown so it was still a fun outing. Celia was displeased at this photo because she wanted to be the one holding Ewan. Connor also declined to get in the picture.

Then on Halloween day we did all our trick or treating almost the entire time between when Josie got out of school till bedtime. We picked her up from school and brought the costumes with us and tossed them on before hitting the local business district for some early practice trick or treating. It got the girls into the habit of  the please and thank you, over some shy times, and seeing people in costume in day light. Celia is at the age where head covering costumes are very scary for her. So we had to hide out and wait for some scary people to leave the area at times before we could continue. At that point, Josie was a yellow princess, Celia was a ballerina and Ewan was a jaguar. Many of the businesses were super generous, like a giant cookie from Olivios and Quebrada just offered up anything in the main case.

After that trick or treating, it started to rain and it was time to go home anyway. We came home, had some candy and some non-candy food. Then we headed over to Waldo park for their annual Halloween party. It’s normally a little more crazy but this year was tame because the rain kept coming and going. The kids did a ‘fashion show’ which consists of walking through a doorway and having your name and costume announced. At this point I think the girls had switched costumes too. We tried to get them to eat some veggie hot dogs and vegetables and remembered to feed ourselves a little too. Then it was time for real trick or treating and I sent Ewan home with Jordi to man our door. We went off with my two plus Josie’s friend Sophie joined us. We made it down Amsden St back to our house at which point Celia wanted a break and stayed home. I took Josie and Sophie down the rest of our street until Sophie said she was ready to go home too, we brought her home and then picked Celia up to finish up a few more houses on the opposite side of our street. Josie was then content. We brought it all home and they dumped out their huge pile of loot. We had even made drop offs of the afternoon candy and still the pumpkins were huge.

Because of the aforementioned rain, plus carrying baby, plus wanting to stay in the moment, you get crummy ipod photos only.

Josie also did a great job carrying around a box for unicef and shaking down the neighbors for money. My favorite was when one person gave her a dollar instead of coins she said “that person gave me the wrong kind of money!” Then I explained how the paper stuff was even better. Her box was stuffed full by the end of the night.

They ate a bunch that night and a few more pieces over each day. They shared with us willingly, what great kids! And then by Tuesday we sent almost all of it to Jordi’s office, and capped off the week of Halloween on Thursday by making some M&M cookies out of the bags I saved for such an event.

Also on Friday after Halloween my dad’s office threw a crazy party. They had crafts for the kids, food that looked liked rats, eyeballs, guts and more gory options, liquid nitrogen ice cream, and custom flip book movies. It was a great time and even had a ‘swamp thing’ cake rumored to weigh 300 lbs! It took up an entire 8ft by 8ft table.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 10th, 2013 at 9:10 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.