halloween: costumes

The best part about Halloween this year was listening to Oliver say "Halloween costume" over and over. Anything that remotely resembled Halloween he would call a Halloween costume. I guess it was extra amusing since he's only started to talk a lot in the last few months and he still refuses to say a lot of simple words (like "yes").

Elsa quickly decided to be a pumpkin and stuck with her choice. Amelia had a hard time deciding. She finally came up with a mermaid fairy. Oliver attempted our old monkey costume for a bit but had an extreme dislike for the bulkiness of the costume and at some point switched to a skeleton. 

halloween: carving pumpkins

I am perpetually two weeks behind on blog posts. To avoid posting Halloween pictures in December, I'll get through those first and then go back to earlier October happenings.

Hurricane Sandy gave us an excuse to hang out at home for a few days, eat pumpkin cinnamon rolls, drink hot chocolate, and carve our pumpkins. We were lucky to never lose power and only had lots of branches and sticks to clean up in the yard when it was all over.

The girls loved designing and carving their pumpkins. Oliver was tentative at first, but soon figured out that he enjoyed scooping out the slimy insides of the pumpkin. And occasionally eating them.

cox farms.

My kids die over the awesomeness of Cox Farms every year. I have to admit, it's a pretty amazing fall festival, especially if you can catch it on a less-crowded day. Which is harder and harder to do each year. But the festival keeps getting bigger and bigger every year. (By the way, if you go in the future, be sure to buy your tickets online. There is no fee and we were able to walk right in. The ticket line was more than 50 people deep.)

We had fun meeting some friends there a few weeks ago. The favorite for everyone is the crazy hay ride with lots of fun gimmicks and the silly corn maze with all kinds of fun surprises. Oliver was in love with the slides and it was hard to keep up with him. He was headed right back to the top the second he hit the bottom.