Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! We hope that everyone had a fun one. Daddy put up amazing decorations in the library for the family to enjoy. The kids loved walking in front of the motion sensors and clapping their hands to make ghost and spiders move and to make scary, talking faces appear on the crystal balls. They were both very brave.

We had several little pumpkins from our visits to the pumpkin patches. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to do the traditional pumpkin carvings with Brielle's and Ronan's faces. But Brielle designed a scary Jack-o-lantern.

Brielle chose the costume themes this year. Daddy and Ronan were pirates, and Mommy and Brielle were butterflies...although I think she later decided we were fairies.

A rare shot where Ronan agreed to wear the hat...

The week before Halloween, Grandma Pat came for a fun visit (and also to provide a tremendous amount of help while Kraig and I were both at conferences...thanks, Mom!).

Our Halloween celebrations started the weekend before Halloween, so Grandma Pat got to enjoy one of the celebrations with us. We attended a Halloween party with the Vegan Families MeetUp group, with plenty of vegan food and candy and other kids to play with.

Grandma Pat handed out candy during trick-or-treating.

The next day, we hosted a Halloween party at our house with our coworkers. All of them have kids, so we thought it would be fun to get them all together. We had plenty of toys around to entertain the little ones.

We set up games, like musical tombstones, pin the spider on the web, and a hunt for bones to build a skeleton.

 The final celebration was at Ronan's school on Halloween.

The whole school dressed up in costumes and went trick-or-treating at the stores and restaurants in the shopping area by the school.

On Halloween night we actually just stayed home, played in the "Halloween room" and toasted pumpkin seeds. We had early celebrations, and we never get trick-or-treaters, so Brielle didn't seem to know she was missing anything that night. Next year we'll venture out to a local neighborhood to do traditional trick-or-treating.

We had a great Halloween week and visit with Grandma Pat. The day after Halloween, Kraig cleared out the Halloween room and put everything in storage for next year. He had Brielle say "good-bye" to everything beforehand, but she was still shocked to see the bare library. She walked around slowly, saying, "no ghost...no spider...no skeletons...", naming each object that was missing from the room. Ronan had a similar reaction when he saw it. He searched for the missing objects, signing "more", and producing single hand claps, hoping that would make the missing spider jump out again. It was heartbreaking, but we assured them that the room will be filled with Christmas decorations soon enough.