Halloween Happenings

Ward Halloween Party. The girls wore their costumes, but at some point Shelby ditched her dress and refused to put it back on.

Halloween dinner! It's no secret that I LOVE doing a festive dinner on Halloween. This year we got to spend it in Arizona with my family because my childhood best friend got married the following weekend. So for dinner we made homemade nachos. Even the chips were homemade and cut out in fun Halloween shapes. Then we had fruit cups designed to look like candy corns, and for dessert we had left over Halloween cupcakes that Lacey brought from Tucker's birthday party.

Trick-or-Treating. Shasta and Shelby both went as princesses. Shasta told everyone she was Aurora, but really the girls just wore dress-ups from their dress-up bin. I've been really cheap about Halloween so far because our budget is always tight. But they still looked cute. And bonus... they wear their costumes year round.

 I love this picture of all the younger cousins (minus Shane because he wouldn't stand with the kids, and Braden because he didn't come with us since he's a newborn). What a fun memory.

And of course the first house on the list is Grammy's and Papa's. They give out full size candy bars every year, but of course my kids picked the suckers. Which they typically did at every house that had them. At least now I know for next year to do some pre-Halloween drills on how to select good candy!

The kids had it made for trick-or-treating. There were 4 adults pushing strollers that gave all seven kids a place to sit so none of them had to walk if they didn't want to. And we trick-or-treated through an entire neighborhood so there was plenty of walking. By the time we got home our kids were loaded with candy. And not the crappy candy they usually get from our poor, college student, young family neighbors. This was legit candy! The bags that Shasta and Shelby are carrying were three fourths full once they were done. And by the time we got back to Utah a week later every last piece was gone!

Choosing and Carving Pumpkins

I LOVE going to the pumpkin patch to let the girls pick out their own pumpkins. This is only the second year we've done it, but it's definitely a tradition we'll keep doing. Can these girls be any cuter?!

 Carving pumpkins was interesting this year. Both girls could help a little more, but carving is still too hard for them so Nick and I did most of theirs, Shelby loved gutting the pumpkins. Each time she pulled her hand out filled with pumpkin guts she would say, "Eww!" as she dropped it into the garbage back. Writing it down doesn't do the sound of her voice justice. It was seriously SO cute! Shasta on the other hand didn't enjoy getting her hands dirty. She got up to wash them every 30 seconds until she finally sucked it up and dealt with it until it was done. After Shelby's pumpkin was all cleaned out, she played with the guts in the garbage bag for a long time. She even tasted it (her idea) and chewed on a few pumpkin seeds. Then once her pumpkin was all carved she filled it up with the pumpkin guts from the bag. What a hoot!

Also, while we carved pumpkins we watched Ernest Scared Stupid which was a little too scary for the girls. I was worried Shasta would have bad dreams, but if she did she never climbed into bed with me. After that movie was over we started watching Nightmare Before Christmas, but we didn't finish it before we were done with pumpkins.

 Mine is the witch and Shelby's is the face. Her eyes once had eyeballs, but she cut them off while Nick and I were carving our pumpkins!

 Shasta's is the flamingo by the palm tree and Nick's is the superhero.

 A closeup of Shelby's to better see the teeth. What a pain. It's shaved instead of carved and after 10 seconds of trying I handed it over for Nick to finish because it was obnoxious! 

And a closeup of mine because it was hard to see the spider in the other picture and that's my favorite part!