Halloween!

We had Jared sort and count his candy from UVA too. 

Gotta do some work to eat all that candy. 

About half way through the week I realized we had not carved our pumpkins yet and realized that the only day to do them with Mark would be Halloween.  He thought this was pretty silly but it worked out beautifully.  Jared originally wanted a Pirate pumpkin but then changed his mind and chose a Ghostbusters one.  At his school the PE teachers do a sort of warm up with the students and they use the Ghostbusters song so Jared is humming it all the time.  Lydia picked a kitty cat pumpkin. You can guess which on e I chose to help with.  Sadly when we went to carve the pumpkins one of them had rotted. The back side was all caved in.  While Mark cleaned out Jared's pumpkin I drove over to a store to get a replacement pumpkin. Our kids are not quite to the helping stage yet when carving pumpkins so they happily watched the Curious George Halloween special while Mark and I did the work.  We had a bowl to put all the pumpkin guts in and while I am not sure Jared ever touched it Lydia loved it and had at least one hand in it almost the whole time.  Our pumpkins turned out great and I was glad Lydia picked such a simple theme. 

 Side note:  I am so happy my hair is getting longer! I feel so much more like myself. I am actually liking its current length more than I thought it would. I haven't cut it since June, slowly but surely. 

Originally we thought we would head over to Forest Lakes a well planned out neighborhood near our house (our neighborhood is not really a neighborhood and not conducive to trick or treating at all) but then our friends the Shaw's decided to have a Fall Fun party at their place so we decided to skip trick or treating and dressing up and go play with them.  Very untraditional of us but we had already gone twice and did not need any more candy. 

We headed over there around 3:00 and had a great time with the Shaw's (Julie, Chris, Sam, and Tyler) and the Wooter's (Ashley, Stuart, and Harrison). These 5 kids get along really well and had a great time.  Lydia is the youngest at almost 4 and Sam is the oldest at 8 so really good ages.  We enjoyed their zip line, had a yummy BBQ, made mini caramel apples ( a melon baller is now on my Christmas list), and then played a round of "donuts on the string" which I totally won.  Possibly because 1/2 of my completion had never done it before. The Wooter's had brought some glow sticks and we had fun playing with them outside while doing the zip line a few more times. We went inside to visit for a little while which was great because I see Julie and Ashley a fair amount but Mark doesn't get to visit with them or their spouses much.  It was so nice that our kids all payed together so well.  It was a really fun night. Their son Sam planned a raffle where we put our names in his Halloween candy bucket and whoever he drew out got a piece of his candy.  It was cute.  Jared had his name drawn first and he told me later that the raffle was his favorite part.  Winning is really important to Jared which is kind of worrisome to me.  

 Mark's first time down

We are so lucky to have such fun friends here in Charlottesville.