Welp. Just like that Halloween is over. I hope you and your family had a great one! This year was my favorite yet and I'm sad to see it go. However I can't be too sad when we're officially in the midst of HOLIDAY SEASON! Before we move on to Thanksgiving and Christmas though it's time for one last Halloween countdown.
Grab a button and join up with Courtney, Jamie, Liz, and I below. Looking forward to seeing all the cute costumes and trick or treating fun everyone had!
I first saw Pumpkin Spice Cheerios at Target over a month ago and I made a mental note to get some next time we went but by then they had vanished. They weren't at the grocery stores either. FINALLY I found some at the Target near my mom's house and grabbed a box for these pumpkin spice cheerio treats. Just like rice krispy treats, but with cheerios. So yummy, and as Ez and I can attest, perfectly acceptable as a breakfast food ;)
On Friday evening we took the kids to a Halloween festival complete with an....EGG HUNT!! You may remember that we did our own egg hunt a week ago and Ez had a blast. I think the egg hunts have been his favorite part of Halloween. Well, that and all the candy.
It's just not a holiday unless there are festive donuts to commemorate it.
If it's possible to go overboard with trick or treating then I think we may have crossed that line this past weekend. We went a total of four times in four days. One day was a bust, because toddlers. (You can read more about it here.) The other three times were so much fun though, and I don't know how Ez and Declan are going to move past the fact that it's over and nobody is handing out free candy anymore.
"I love carving pumpkins, except for the part where you carve the pumpkin." ~ kids
You may have seen this quote on my IG, but since it so perfectly sums up my kids' attitude toward pumpkin carving I figured it was worth sharing again. You'd think I specifically put seeds and stringy guts in the pumpkins just to ruin their lives. Somehow the pumpkins still got carved though, and Ez does like looking at the finished product, so I think that's as close to a "win" as we're gonna get this year.
If you want to know the significance of Halloween balloons, just look back one post. Turns out a balloon can basically make or break a toddler's world. On Sunday we witnessed the rapid downward spiral of two toddlers with only one balloon to split between them. It was not a pretty sight. So I secretly went out and bought two balloons and had them downstairs and waiting Halloween morning. Ez was the first one up and he sat down completely unaware of the balloons for a few moments before screaming "It's a PUMPKIN BALLOON!!!" His life was made. Declan was just as happy when he woke up and found his very own balloon to pummel and drag around everywhere with him. He loved his so hard it's already popped, so now we're back to fighting over one. Sigh...
Along with the balloons I also indulged Ez and set up one last Halloween egg hunt using the same eggs and repurposed trick or treating candy. The egg hunt was actually overshadowed by the excitement of the balloons, which is saying a lot if you've been paying attention to Ez's obsession with egg hunts. Eventually though he realized there was candy in the eggs and he diligently hunted most of them down. Some of them were hidden a little too well and would randomly resurface throughout the day. That set the tone for a nice, sugary Halloween. We took the middle part of the day easy, although there was the option to do a downtown trick or treat, but I was pretty trick or treated out, and wanted to save energy for the big one in the evening.
Last year we tried trick or treating near our house, and that was a complete bust. Thankfully the kids were too young to care. This year though there would've been no living it down if we didn't go trick or treating for real. Thankfully, after living here for over a year we have a pretty good idea of which neighborhoods are gonna have the good candy. And boy did we hit the motherload. One of the houses was basically decorated like a mini haunted mansion from Disneyland, complete with elaborately dressed Disney characters (Anna, Elsa, Captain Jack Sparrow...). Next year I'm just gonna go live in their yard for the month of October. The whole street was so festive, and the perfect length for Ez and Declan to hit up all the houses and start melting down right at the very end.
I'm so proud of how well they did. Ez even remembered to say thank you at each of the houses, although it was usually after he was already halfway back down the walkway. Declan insisted on carrying his own bucket, even when it got so heavy that it was dragging along the sidewalk. We wound up having to empty it into Ez's bucket and between the two of them they got a little more than one full bucket of candy. Not bad for their first real trick or treating experience. Ez went as a Clippers player, his favorite costume. Considering how overpriced jerseys are I feel better knowing we definitely got our money's worth from that shirt this week. Declan went as a skeleton and when a really elaborately dressed adult skeleton stopped and told him "we're related!" Declan stopped in his tracks, gave a little nervous giggle, and then slowly backed away until big skeleton took the hint and left. He was looking over his shoulder for a long time after that.
And just like that it's all over. What do you all do with the candy overload? I'm thinking I'll just hide it all in the back of the cupboard and hope they forget about it...
Who's excited for Thanksgiving and Christmas???
So fun!! This October went by so fast! And that egg hunt- I cant decide if its genius or dangerous lol ;)
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