Halloween Fun (Some catching up...)

Well, I have been terrible with blogging lately, which is sad, because this is the only type of journal I have right now.  So I'm doing a little catching up today!

Waaay back in October, our neighbors decorated their door for Halloween.  Naomi LOVED it and asked me every day, numerous times a day, if we could decorate our door, too.  So I pulled up some pictures on google of different Halloween door-decorating ideas, and Naomi chose the one she wanted to do.  Here is our finished door!  (We decorated on a Sunday after church, which is why Naomi is wearing a dress).

Naomi also helped me make what we call "brownie pumpkins" for our neighbor friends (and one for ourselves).  There is a woman in my church at home in PA who makes these brownies for every family in the ward, every single year in October.  We LOVED them as kids, and we'd look forward to them all year long.  It is part of Halloween for me, so it is a tradition I have tried to do every year as well, although there is no way I could ever make them for every family in our ward.  But I at least try to make one for us, and if I can, for some of our friends or neighbors. 

My cute helper sorting the M&Ms for me!

Naomi & one of the finished pumpkins!

I had taken the girls to a pumpkin patch on our Girls Weekend, but Naomi wanted to go back with Daddy, so Jacob & I took the girls to another pumpkin patch on a different weekend.  They had SO much fun, especially Naomi.  They had so many activities for the kids-- a hay maze/obstacle course which Naomi absolutely loved, lots of slides, little kiddie tractors to ride around on, swings, a tower to climb up in, a big pirate ship, corn mazes, and a bunch of other things that I'm not remembering.  We had a lot of fun!

Steering the pirate ship

One of the awesome slides... it was hard to pull Naomi away from them!

Aleta liked throwing the hay off the hayride.

Ready for the hayride around the farm!

On the hayride

Please ignore the big scab on Aleta's nose!

Jacob took Naomi up onto the tower

Running through the corn maze.

Pumpkins!

Checking out the animals

They were trying to lift the giant pumpkins

Aleta tried to push Naomi on the wagon.

This was part of the big obstacle course.  Naomi loved the obstacle course... she spent more time on that than anything, and it was so hard to get her to leave!

Spinning around in the giant tire

For our Halloween costumes, we were all characters from Peter Pan.  Our costumes weren't anything fabulous (other than Naomi's, which we bought off Craigslist), but I was still pretty proud of them since I made them all from thrift store finds!  We built our costumes around Naomi's, because she really, really wanted to be Tinkerbell.  I was able to find a really awesome Tinkerbell costume for cheap on Craigslist, so for the rest of us, I spent HOURS over multiple days driving to every thrift store and Goodwill within 40 minutes of us here in St. Louis.  It was ridiculous.  With some cutting and some sewing, this is what we ended up with:

This is a terrible picture (other than for Jacob, who is actually smiling, which never happens in photos!) but it's the only one I got of our whole family.  Someone took it at our ward Halloween party.  Naomi is Tinkerbell, Jacob was Peter Pan, I was Wendy, and Aleta was Nana the dog!  I was most proud of Aleta's costume... it was so hard to find the stuff I needed and figure out how to make it all work together!  Sadly, I forgot to draw on her puppy face for the party, and her hood isn't even up in the picture.  So here's a better one of her costume, from another day:

And she was supposed to look something like this:

I was actually pretty happy with how Aleta's costume turned out.  I used brown sweatpants & a brown Gap hoodie from a children's second-hand clothing store, then I cut the ears and belly from an old crappy towel, and I sewed them on the hoodie.  The hat was a white summery baby hat that we already had, and I just sewed it on the way I wanted it to sit on her hood.  And since I sewed the hat, belly, and ears on by hand, it was super easy to rip out the stitches so our hat and the hoodie are perfectly fine to use normally again!

Here are a few more photos from the night of the ward party...

Showing off her facepaint!  (It's a flower)

We finally got around to carving our pumpkin like a night or two before Halloween, and it went terribly!  Next year, I am buying a cheap carving kit with the special little knives for carving pumpkins.

On Halloween day, I planned lots of fun activities for the girls & I to do at home.  We read all of our Halloween stories in their Princess tent, did pumpkin ghost bowling (explanation below), colored Halloween pictures, made pumpkin sugar cookies, and watched some Halloween movies.  It was a fun day!

She was going "ooooooo" like a ghost... haha

The pumpkin ghost bowling was an idea I got from some website (I probably found it on pinterest).  I cut little circles and ovals out of black construction paper and taped them onto toilet paper rolls to make them look like ghosts.  Then we set them up for bowling, and the girls bowled with their little pumpkin.  They loved it, especially Naomi.  Aleta was a bit more interested in building towers with the "ghosts".