Halloween and more

The best part of Halloween was going to Scott and Steph’s for Kyle to open his mission call.  It was nice to be with all our family for such an exciting event.  Brazil here he comes….well, in 5 or so months. :-).The kids got to do a little trick-or-treating around the block before we had friends coming over for a Halloween Party.  This neighborhood is lots different from our last one, so this was a surprise for us, but most of the houses pass out treats, and most of the kids come around with their parents.  Had we known we would have saved the party for the weekend so the kids could have enjoyed more than 20 minutes of being out.  But that’s ok – the party turned out great too.

As soon as Neil got home from trick-or-treating he immediately sat down and pulled out a sucker.

The Albertson’s joined us too.

First we decorated balloons with sharpies and then hung them from the ceiling.  The kids got to take turns shooting the balloons with Nerf guns.  Different color balloons were different points.  It was really fun!  We didn’t get many pictures that night, oh well.  We were enjoying the moment.

Jessie’s friend drew this awesome witch balloon.

Next we decorated bags to put your loot in.  The girls were definitely way more into this part than the boys!!  And it took way longer than I thought it would.  I was so thankful for Addie who jumped in to help.  (Ken was having issues with his work computers and so he was trying to fix them and help with a party and that was CRAZY!)

Then we played hi-ho-cherry-o with some Halloween game boards Abbie and I made a couple of years ago.  Only we had three dice going around the circle of friends so it wouldn’t take too long.  1-4 were numbers that let you pull off the equal number of candies.  5 was put one candy back on and 6 was add back two candies.  The person who cleared their board was the winner and then everyone could eat the candies that they had cleared and then we restocked the boards.  Even the big kids loved it!  We had a bunch of different treats to fill your board so everyone would have something they liked.

Time passed really fast so we skipped the next game I had planned and moved on to trick-or-treating upstairs at the bedrooms.  My kids have done this before at Grandma’s and loved it so we did it again.  There was a hopscotch game made from tape on the floor down the hallway to my room that Ken made for us.  (Which we left intact for about a month afterwards and the kids were always jumping down the hall to brush their teeth.  That was really fun.)  Jessie helped man a room with bean bags you tossed into pumpkin buckets and you got the candy out of which ever bucket you made a basket in.  Ken did a cootie catcher.  One of the kids favorite ones was getting two pieces of candy, or trading a candy and Ken surprised them with the losing a piece of candy.  There was also sing a song, and tell a joke to get a candy.

After the house was finally quite again  I found these on the counter.  And they all belonged to Neil.

Trying on Jessie wig the next morning.A cute baby picture.Neil and I play Go Fish a lot.  He loves collecting the Happy Neil cards.

For one of Mark’s scout things he had to visit Historical Sites.  So on Sunday afternoon Ken picked some out that were close by and we went for a drive.  It was actually quite a bit of fun and we got to see some places we would've never gone to otherwise.  An old church and a candy factory were two on the list.  I love the candy factory’s address: 534 to 600.

Before bed Neil was playing in a blanket and Ken grabbed it off of him…that started a whole new game where Neil would stand in between the folds of the blanket the Ken would pull it up as quick as he could and everyone would laugh at how staticy Neil’s hair was.  It was great!

For FHE treats the next day I told the kids I would go back up and get some candy from the candy shop since they were only open from 11-1.  Talk about disappointing.  They do most of their ordering stuff online and all they had to sell in the tiny store were some over-sized suckers and chocolate dipped things like gummy bears :-(.  You can’t even take a tour of the place.  Bummer.  Rachel meet me there since I thought it would be something cool, oh well.  We stopped for salad at Wendy’s before we went home and I got a picture of Rachel and Isaac with the new shirt I got for him:  “Cool like my Auntie.”