The Young and the Restless

Happy Halloween!!

Another fun holiday come and gone...we delayed the great pumpkin carving extravaganza until Monday's FHE because the life span of these poor jack-o-lanterns is very short here in the AZ heat. It has only been 4 days and they're already turning brown around the edges and wilting away (hmmm, maybe I should relieve them of their front porch duties...). We were sad that we had to do the carving sans the Daddy-o (doesn't "sans" mean "without" in Spanish? I don't know, it sounded cool). Unfortunately he had to work late. He's such a hard worker and was sad that he had to miss the big event. The afternoon started out as "one of THOSE days" where the kids were suffering from a serious lack of sleep over the weekend and it was one thing after another. I opted to do a "family home afternoon" instead of evening because I needed an outlet for the kids besides killing eachother. This picture sets the mood at the beginning perfectly, but it was nothing that a good old fashioned pumpkin carving couldn't take care of. By the end we were all laughing, especially when the kids were playing on the swing set and got soaked by the sprinklers. It turned out to be a fun and memorable afternoon.

Halloween was a fun/busy day. I was up the whole night before getting things ready for the Halloween party at the preschool that I teach at. Jayden comes with me one day a week, so he also had fun partying with his friends. I would have liked to have helped out at Kylie's class party, but that was impossible considering there was no party :( In fact, they purposely distracted from the holiday by declaring Oct. 31 "drug awareness day" and had all sorts of activities related to that. It was salt in an open wound. The only time they acknowledged the holiday was by sending home a letter suggesting to donate your Halloween candy to the school's carnival. No thank you. I'd rather give it to Jayden's school where atleast they're giving it to the food bank. I really do love Kylie's school, I was just a little disappointed with the anti-Halloween spirit. But have no fear, my friend Mandy and I took matters into our own hands. After the preschool party I spent the afternoon getting ready for our own little Halloween bash with the neighborhood kids from our ward. I think we ended up with like 25 kids in our back yard. Mandy had a cute Jello craft, Chelsea had a fabulous pin the tail on the cat game, and some other moms did some fun games and brought yummy food as well (I was sad that I forgot to do the cake walk and was stuck with 36 mini-cupcakes, just what I did NOT need). I did some far-from-professional face painting and we even ended with a hayless hay ride. My kids had alot of fun and hopefully the other kids did too.

After the party we rushed to eat the pumpkin shaped pizza I had made for dinner and then Jason and the kids literally ran out the door to go trick or treating as I'm trying to adjust costumes (in the midst of the mad rush we even forgot the ever important eye liner mustache, goatee and whiskers). Once again they made quite the haul and had a fun time doing it. After that our neighbors had a little Halloween party and we had a great time hanging out with them. We really lucked out with such great neighbors here. We live on a cul-de-sac thing and it's fun to have all the kids come out and ride bikes in the evenings while the adults hang out, we've never lived in a neighborhood like this where the neighbors are so close, it's great. Anyways....we partied there until the kids were completely wiped out. What a fun Halloween, although I'm glad I have a whole other year to recuperate!