I love having little kids because never in my entire life have holidays been so fun.
I mean, Halloween was a WEEK-- or at least a really long weekend-- and ended with the most awesome display of candy I have ever seen. The Lego table that is in our living room (which? WHY IS IT IN OUR LIVING ROOM?) is sagging in the middle there is so much candy. And I LOVE candy, so this whole thing makes me giddy. (Except for the fact that the Lego table is in the living room to begin with. I actually saw a picture that a friend took of her kid in my living room on Halloween, and it made me realize there is a scale problem with basically all of the living room furniture, so it's way to overwhelming to fix. I'll probably just leave the Lego table for the grandchildren to play with someday.)
On Friday morning I got to go to Jack's class to do pumpkin math, which was predictably fun and adorable and kind of messy. I
did it when Harry was in second grade, so I knew the drill. Also, I cannot BELIEVE that I thought to take pictures of neglected jack's class, but I didn't blog any of Harry-- crazy.
The best thing about this picture is that jack probably didn't even know the answer-- he raises is hand for EVERY QUESTION EVERY TIME. Ha!
He was so happy and excited to be measuring, weighing, scooping, and counting his pumpkin.
Here's his cute little worksheet. All of the third graders took their estimations VERY SERIOUSLY.
At the end he painted his pumpkin, which says Go Cubs Go, duh. Also today is garbage day, so I put all of the pumpkins on the curb, and if the Cubs lose tonight, I will feel really really bad about that.
His go-to picture pose:
When I picked Cooper and Dorothy up from school, they demanded that we made Halloween cut out cookies, and I happily obliged. I put in about twice as much butter as the recipe called for (I halved the recipe to speed up the process and because I knew that I only had enough powdered sugar to make a little bit of frosting and because buckets of candy were in our immediate future, but I forgot all that when I added the butter), and I thought the cookies were ruined because we had to roll them out in so much flour I ran out of normal flour and had to break into the bread flour stash I always have handy because you never know when you might want to make some bread. But! They were DELICIOUS and I look forward to using too much butter for Christmas cookies.
After Ben and the big kids got home, our room became an intense staging ground for Halloween. The kids had Trunk or Treat at the elementary school, and Ben and I had a grown-up "Come as Your Favorite Song" party at our favorite bar.
Cooper was completely wild about his scary clown costume. You might remember seeing Harry and Jack dress up as not-so-scary clowns
back in the day.
Scary brothers
Fairly scary crew in general, actually:
Yikes. And yes, Harry was that werewolf a f
ew years ago. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and all that.
Ben and I came home, jammed the baies in bed, gave Jack and Harry free reign of the TV and their Trunk or Treat spoils, and threw on our costumes. I was the lunch lady from
"Lunch Lady Land," and Ben was JFK from "We Didn't Start the Fire"
But we didn't look as good as Slash, whose wife was Axel.
Saturday was a lovely, Halloween-free day. Ben and the boys went to a flag football tournament for most of the day, leaving me and Dorothy home to clean the house and pick up our online grocery order (life changer). Before they left, I took an hour to walk, and I was charmed by October's bright blue weather, as always.
Dorothy couldn't believe it was still sandal season in Wisconsin and used her McDonalds gift card that her grandma and grandpa always send for Halloween to have a picnic on the porch.
We spent Sunday morning watching Harry's team win a game 7-1 at the ungodly hour of 7:45
And then we lazed around before getting dressed up for our family pictures, which look pretty good if the sneak peaks are any indicator.
I made vampire donuts for Harry and Jack's classes, and I spent $60 on donuts, M&Ms and vampire teeth, which is what you should remind me next time I think I need to bring a themed holiday snack to school.
Instead of making scary bagel faces for Halloween breakfast like usual, I scrambled some eggs and toasted some waffles and cut up some fruit so they could make their own scary waffles faces. And they did, for the most part:
Cooper got to wear his costume to school, and he insisted on full make up, of course.
Dorothy also donned a costume so we could go to the Halloween dance party at our favorite library-- with a quick stop at Target on the way
But she got really hot from all the dancing, shed her costume, and bossed a bunch of babies around at the train table instead.
We had a bunch of friends over on Halloween night to eat pizza and my favorite fat kid food, buffalo chicken dip, and take the kids trick-or-treating. It was chaotic and really, really, really fun. So fun that I didn't even care that my house was trashed from top to bottom and it took me until almost 11 to clean it all up. I think I was just high on almond Joys.
Even Baby Henry got in on the action.
We drove en masse to a neighboring neighborhood so out friends could show us their scary front yard. When we got their, none of the people who were at our house with us were in sight (because it takes awhile to buckle 4 kids into the car), so we assumed they were inside. A note on the front doors said to get candy from the skeleton in front of the coffin. Harry did, and, of course, the skeleton was our friend, who screamed boo right when harry stuck is hand into the candy bowl, and harry screamed and fell down, and then all of our friends and their kids started dying laughing from their hiding spots on the front porch. It was adorable. We decided to hit up one more house around the corner because our friends who lived their texted to say their had plenty of Fireball apple cider and candy left. The kinds immediately started playing in the basement and the grown ups hung out for a few minutes, but it was a school night, so we gathered the kids and told them it was time to go.
Which was when our little clown started screaming, BUT WE JUST GOT HERE and had to be removed from the premises like a sack of potatoes. A sign of an excellent Halloween
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