Elise's New Bike

Elise won a bike at school yesterday.  A couple of weeks ago they had the kids fill out a little packet about school lunch (just a few coloring/activity pages) and the kids who turned them in were entered into a drawing.  Not very many kids turned theirs in, so the odds were in her favor.  She was pretty confident that she was going to win, but I kept telling her not to get her hopes up.  I guess she showed me.  Lucky girl!

Halloween 2012

We had a pretty low effort Halloween at this house.  We had listened to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the way to and from California, so the kids were totally okay with reprising the Harry Potter Halloween theme from last year.  I felt a little lame after the fact for having them wear the same costumes two years in a row, but it was really nice to not have to buy or make costumes this year.  We were slackers and didn’t do a family party or anything else very special this year.  We’ll call it our reset year.  We did carve pumpkins.  The kids all had very strong opinions about what they wanted to carve and did the bulk of the work on their own.  They needed just enough help to keep me busy moving from one to the other all night (except Emily who did hers on her own from start to finish).  When everyone was done, I carved my quality pumpkin in three minutes flat so it could make the photo shoot on the porch.

Emily and Elise were awake at 6:30 on Halloween morning.  Since we had an hour to kill, we did cute Gryffindor nails to go with their costumes.  The kids had the Halloween parade and class parties at school.  When they got home, we ran down to Lee’s for their trick-or-treating event and then waited around for it to be time to go trick-or-treating.  I took the kids to a few houses in our neighborhood and then we met up with friends.  Ben and his friends ventured out on their own while Wendy, Claudy, and I went around with the girls.  They were troopers and we covered lots of ground.  It was unseasonably warm (70 degrees) and the girls got really hot in their fleece Hogwarts robes.  They are already planning on having lightweight costumes next year so they won’t overheat.  It will probably snow. :)

The kids got tons of candy.  They all had a box of “candy sticks” that looked just like candy cigarettes that I used to buy when I was a kid.  I showed them how I used to pretend to smoke them and followed up with a quick reminder that “I don’t care if you pretend to smoke candy cigarettes, but never smoke the real ones.”  I might have created a monster with Abby.  She came in Thursday morning “smoking” a Kit Kat.