Halloween 2010

Survival Tip #3: Take Advantage of Opportunities to Celebrate!

What a lovely Halloween it was this year! It started out with a super fun time in the older nursery at church, and ended with a really peaceful evening at home! I felt so lucky to have a day filled with people I care about, and lots of photo opportunities. After church I was able observe Kathy Absher shooting Louisa's senior portraits. I loved getting to spend time with Lou and Kathy, and it was really great to observe Kathy and her husband Tom work together to get some great shots captured! Here are two of the ones I snagged myself:

lovely Louisa

Wright's Park, About 2 blocks from our apartment. It is BEAUTIFUL this time of year!

Immediately after the photo shoot ended we grabbed lunch (greek fries, if you love feta, you gotta try em!), and then rushed off to get pumpkins. Yes, it was Halloween day; I won't deny we procrastinated this year. And we certainly felt the affects of waiting until the last minute. We always get our pumpkins from a specific farm where Vander and the guys hunt ducks and geese every year, so we were quite surprised to pull up and find the farm closed. CLOSED?! This could not be! So we walked up to the house and found out the patch had closed early because of top rot problems. We decided to look anyways, and unfortunately, they were not exaggerating. The tops of all the pumpkins were rotting out! We managed to grab a few gourds for pumpkin bowling at church and for ourselves, and that was really it. I look forward to every Halloween because it means Lou, Emily and I take our traditional pumpkin patch picture, but with the top rot disappointment, it was okay that Emily couldn't make it. :) We'll try again next year.

our "pumpkins"

That night we went to church for a Harvest Party the youth put on for the kids at church. Vander ran a fishing game where the kids threw their poles out over a blue tarp, then a student would clip candy on the end of the line and the kiddos would "real" it back in. Sometimes, for the older kids, they would first clip on a shoe or some "garbage", but Vander would have the kids throw it back and it would be replaced with candy. I helped Louisa run the face painting booth. One of my favorite customers requested a moustache... so cute!

In front of the fishing game, in our costumes.

It was a really fun night! So many kids came from the church is ADORABLE costumes! Afterwards, we headed home and Vander watched football while I carved my little gourd. Inspired by Vander, this is how it turned out:

Can you tell it is a football? It was a little tricky to carve on such a small pumpkin, but it was worth it. I look forward to carving pumpkins every year!

So that was basically our Halloween. Busy. But really fun! I hope to post soon with some pictures from a recent fall walk with Vander, and also of some decorations I made for a baby shower. Now if I can just post before it becomes a week late!