Mickey Ears

Blogging about Ailey's and my Disneyland trip this past weekend is on my list.

It's a long list.

Somewhere on that list is laundry (we're all running out of some essentials); making dessert for Wednesday night dinner at church; making muffins for church on Sunday; um, vacuuming; unpacking my backpack (can't believe I actually unpacked my suitcase already!); a Costco trip; and I suppose lots of other things I will think of on my way to doing something from the list. Like this post - it wasn't on the to-do list! But luckily I type fast, so posting one picture won't take me long

And this is a cute picture, yes? Ailey and I picked out the Minnie ears for Marin and Silje, and they were so excited about them! Excited enough to pose for a picture. I hope this tides you over until I can get those 300 pictures we took uploaded to the blog. Just kidding. I won't post ALL of them. Half, maybe....

Happy Halloween!

We continued our Halloween tradition this year with Parker, Levi and family: Papa Murphy's pizza for dinner, followed by costuming up and heading out to trick-or-treat the neighborhood.

With costumes on we brought out the glow-sticks ...

We had a flapper, a cowgirl, dracula, a vampire bat, and Ariel the princess. They all had long-sleeves under their costumes, but it was so nice and mild out that we didn't even need coats or rainboots!

Our jack-o-lanterns lit the way for trick-or-treaters to visit our house too. Though we didn't get nearly enough to empty the Costco bag of candy. Darn-it!

Happy Halloween!

Pumpkin Carving

Today was pumpkin carving day. They can survive two days to Halloween, right? So I thought. But I didn't take into consideration our mischevious resident squirrels. Thus, Silje's pumpkin is now topless. Seriously, the top just disappeared in the 30 minutes between placing the pumpkins outside and going out to admire them again. Now they are safely stored in the garage until Monday evening. Hopefully no more topless pumpkins.

We have some Ailey-Original designs this year. Both Marin and Silje asked her to draw the pictures to be carved on their pumpkins.

Ailey's is the "toothless smile". With eyelashes, of course.

Marin has the "bat" - and mind you, that is a GIRL bat, though I had to modify it slightly from Ailey's drawing because I didn't think I would get the face-complete-with-eyelashes done quite right.

Silje's is a princess crown - though hers is missing the jewels and large "S" that Ailey detailed onto it. (I know, I know, I'm such a slacker.)

Andy's pumpkin got a UW Husky in honor of the football team he is watching tonight with his cousin. (I would have enjoyed going to the game myself, but, um, I think I'll stay home and be WARM.)

My pumpkin is neglected this year. I brought them all inside a couple days ago so that I wasn't digging freezing cold guts out of them, and I put them safely behind the gate ... next to the fireplace. Unfortunately, my pumpkin didn't like that and got a little "soft". Ah well. It's beautifully round, isn't it?

We enjoyed the Trunk-or-Treating at church last night, complete with games and a spaghetti dinner. In addition to the prizes they earned shooting baskets, fishing for ... ducks, and pinning the nose on the pumpkin, they are enjoying their first round of candy today. Luckily, I'm raising my girls to share. Yum.

Pumpkin Patch Visits

The Farm at Swan's Trail in Snohomish seems to be our pumpkin patch of choice. We started going there when Ailey was in her first year of preschool and the preschool went there for their field trip. It's a fun family farm with animals, a hay barn, a huge corn maze (though we haven't tried this out), this year a new Four Little Pigs show, and, of course, TONS of pumpkins.

The field trips take a hay ride out to the further pumpkin patches for the kids to pick out their pumpkins. The tractor driver is very entertaining, instructing everyone to stay in their seats with a rhyme and dance.

This year wasn't Marin and Silje's first visit out there, but it was their first as part of the preschool field trip. It was just the three of us, and we had a beautiful day for it.

On the hay ride.

They chose their pumpkins pretty quickly and even carried them around most of the time.

They even posed for me a couple times...

Last year Ailey's Kindergarten class took a field trip to The Farm, but not this year. So today we went as a family. We got lucky with weather again, and it was even warm enough to take our coats off!

The Farm is having a great year for pumpkins. The girls found some to sit on.

Have a pumpkin! This is just one row of the main field.

The girls found one big enough for all three to sit on.

And here are the three we picked out - beauties!

The girls had so much fun running through the field that we stuck around for a while after loading our pumpkins in the car. It was warm, but after the last few days of rain we also brought home a lot of mud!

We'll carve our pumpkins in the next few days. One costume party under our belts, and now we're set with our pumpkins, we're ready for Halloween!

Harvest Party

SNOMOMS, my twin club, has a Harvest Party every year in October. It has always been a fun family event - there are usually kid crafts, food, and a costume parade at the end. It's so fun to see all the kids, and many of the parents, dressed up in costume!

Many of the parents are really good at coordinating their kids' costumes. My favorite this year was the whole family costumed for Alice in Wonderland - one of the three girls was Alice, another the Queen of Hearts, the next as the Rabbit, Mom was a playing card guard and Dad was the Mad Hatter! (Even better than that, they got all the costumes at GoodWill!)

The closest I've gotten to coordinating the girls is to have Marin and Silje as a bee and a ladybug. And the next year as a ladybug and a bee. They just switched costumes and never knew the difference!

For this year I had purchased Marin and Silje's costumes last year on clearance. Only as Halloween got closer did I almost regret that, knowing that they were getting to the age where they would know what they wanted to "be". Luckily I introduced the costumes before they were asked "What do you want to be for Halloween?" and they were really excited when I pulled out the purple flapper and the cowgirl costumes - AND they didn't even fight over them! (I'm sure I'll have to repay that luck sometime soon....)

Ailey has been saying she wants to be Ariel for months. She stuck to that, and we found a great Ariel costume. We even sprayed her hair with red glitter paint.

Making lollipop ghosts...

We're definitely going to add MORE red glitter spray to Ailey's hair when she puts on her costume next week!



There will be more pictures of the girls in costume in the next week. We have our usual Halloween night with Parker and Levi planned and can't wait to see their costumes too. Happy Halloween!