It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

Halloween Extravaganza

Okay, I’ll just say it. I’m ready for Halloween to be over. I’m scary movied out. And the kids already have enough candy to put them into a week-long sugar coma.

Every year, my husband’s office has a big Halloween party for the kids. This year, he was in charge of it. He has been making crafts at home, and there have been popcorn hands multiplying by the dozen over the past week. But, my favorite craft has to be the milk carton skeletons:

So, Friday was the big party day! I dressed Eli up as Sportacus, and Georgia up as a fairy, and off we went:

Eric works in one of those big office towers, and I think there were four floors who had games for kids and people giving out candy. Eli loved playing all of the games, and Georgia discovered a little mummy statue, who I think she thought was an actual person. She kept going back to it and talking to it. Since her “talking” consists of a series of grunts and screeches, it was really quite adorable.

Anyway, we only made it through two floors. By then, the kids' little buckets were filled to the brim. The good thing about this is that they get to trick-or-treat safely inside, and on Halloween night when it’s dark outside and 30-something degrees, we only have to take them to a few houses. It works out perfectly.

In addition to that, Eli still has trick-or-treating to do at preschool. I am actually going to have to empty his bucket so he has room for more candy. Crap. We are going to be eating Halloween candy until next freaking Halloween!

Every year, we like to take the kids to a pumpkin patch to get the traditional photos, so that was on our agenda for this weekend. We don’t actually buy any pumpkins there, since we already got our pumpkins for $2 each at Wal-Mart. I think the pumpkin patches are starting to figure this out, as the one we usually go to has started charging $6 per person (including small children) for admission. WTF?!

So, instead of shelling out $24, we got creative. We went to our local nursery, which is in itself, huge. They had tons of pumpkins outside, so we parked the kids, and snapped a few picture. When they look at the pictures in 10 years, they will never realize they’re not at an actual pumpkin patch. And we did get some cute pictures:

including some great ones of the kids feeding the fish:

I can thank Eric for this great idea. I was ready to toss the kids in the big bin of pumpkins at Wal-Mart and snap a couple of photos before they threw us out.

Speaking of photos, how come all the pictures I take of the kids with Eric are perfect:

And all the photos of me with the children look like this:

*sigh*

I can’t seem to get any decent pictures of them together either. Eric always wonders why I pay so damn much money to take the kids to Portrait Innovations. Well, Portrait Innovations’ pictures look like this:

Mine look like this:

Enough said.