Happy Halloween

What a fun Halloween! There really wasn't anything that extraordinary about it but I think what made it so much fun is that Joe had the whole day off to be home with us! I really think this might be the first time that's happened since we had kids! Very early in the year he started thinking about how he always has to work on holidays and fun days throughout the year so he sat down with the time off request book for his work and requested to be off for the 4th of July and Halloween, both of our birthdays and our anniversary, plus Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and anything else he could think of when he wouldn't want to work. Actually, for Halloween he requested off not only today but tomorrow, too, so he can stay up late tonight without having to worry about getting up early to be at work at 6am on Saturday. Yipee!!!

We just hung out during the first part of the day and in the afternoon we took the kids to Carl's Jr to eat lunch and play on the playground. That's one of their favorite places to go but Joe and I don't especially love it so we went to Blimpie first and got sandwiches to go so it all worked out well. We met Aunt Savanah and Grandma Cindy at Valley Fair Mall for trick-or-treating with their cousins at 5 and that was awesome because they got a ton of candy in just under an hour! Then you can come home and it doesn't matter if you only go to 10 houses in your neighborhood because they've already got a bunch of candy. Actually, the weather was unusually warm this year so the kids spent quite a bit of time going around with Joe to a bunch of houses. We have so much candy! I stood outside in a t-shirt and bare feet (that's how warm it was!) passing out candy on the sidewalk to save the kids some time walking up to the door. It was like a California Halloween! I loved it!

Savannah decided months ago she wanted to be a cheerleader so I found her a costume on eBay back in August and tried my best to keep her from completely wearing it out before Halloween. If you don't know, Katie is constantly doing the best monster voice so I thought a monster costume would be perfect. She loved Monsters, Inc. so she got to be Sully and she was really excited about that. I also got hers almost 2 months ago so she's had fun wearing it from time to time and she would make me laugh because she'd find it and put it on herself, then come up to me with the hood on holding up claw hands and saying, in her best monster voice, "I'm a mean, scary monster". When I'd pretent to be scared she'd quickly pull off the hood and say with her cute smile, "me just Katie." This would then repeat over and over again for 5 or 10 minutes until I managed to distract her or get the costume off. Alex got to be the pumpkin, which became a tradition out of laziness when I didn't want to find a costume for Katie's 1st Halloween and decided to recycle Savannah's. At least a pumpkin is gender-neutral and I think it's a really cute pumpkin costume so I'm all about the recycling/tradition idea. Just for fun, I'll put a picture of all the kids wearing it. Savannah and Alex are 8 1/2 months in their pictures and Katie was 7 months when she wore it. Happy Halloween!

This is a fun picture of Alex and Katie laughing and playing at our ward Halloween Party.


This year I wasn't motivated enough to come up with costumes for Joe and myself so we're just boring old parents for Halloween.




Our Three Little Pumpkins