Happy Halloween!

Ahhh Halloween, one of my absolute favorite holidays. If I had the time, money, and creativity, I'd have a super haunted house every year. Since I don't, for now, I just try to make it as fun as possible for me and the kids. This year Rylissa begged for a party. She really wanted to have some friends over. I thought, since Tim wasn't going to be here, maybe we should, so that we can have fun all day, and make it feel special. I invited 3 other families, who's husbands were also gone for various reasons. We started with pumpkin carving.

Here we have Rylissa, she's not afraid to get dirty!

Corben, like the man he is, had no problem letting Kimmee scoop out his pumpkin guts for him! Thanks Kimmee!

Here we have another wonderful shot of the kids getting messy, except for Corben, who seems to be supervising the chaos!

We had 4 adults, and 11 kids over. At every moment there were at least 8 kids carving, at one point 9 when Tatum joined in the fun. That's a lot of pumpkin guts!

After the pumpkins we decided to make marshmallow pops ala my friend Rindy. Ours didn't even come close, the kids were too busy dipping and eating the marshmallows before they could decorate them and make them cutsie!

Even Tazers dipped a marshmallow, then dug in. Surprisingly she stayed relatively clean, I was waiting for the chocolate mess that would inevitably spread all over the furniture, but it was contained to the table.
At this point, Corben was feeling rather sick of marshmallows.

We had some lunch, and then Keira and Rylissa decided to help me decorate a bit. Thanks girls, I really enjoyed the artwork, and especially enjoyed watching Rylissa clean it up for me! :)

After the party, we had some down time to just relax from all the chaos, but soon it was time to start getting ready. They have a specific time limit to trick or treating on base. You can start at 6:00, then you're supposed to be done by 8:00. So the plan was to meet up with MaryAnn and her kids at 5:45 then head out and around, until us pregnant women couldn't walk anymore. I let all the kids choose their costumes this year, except Tayzia, who has no clue whats going on yet. Rylissa wanted to be a fairy, and we compromised with Tinkerbell. Corben wanted to be Teen Titans Robin. (His costume was SO BIG on him. I had to sew up the legs just so he wouldn't trip over himself, but the chest of the costume just about drowned him!) Tayzia got to be a little ballerina! She was soooo cute in her costume!

Tazers refused to look at the camera! Rylissa loved that I let her wear makeup!

We had been getting scattered showers throughout the day, and when we started on our way it was sprinkling a bit. Nothing too bad, but enough that I offered rain coats. Tayzia let me put hers on, but the others refused, so we took umbrellas instead. Of course as always, I ended up just carrying all the stuff and they ran to the doors.

She tried so hard to keep up with the rest of the kids. This is the first time I let her have any freedom walking. Normally I just have her stay in the stroller, but I wanted her to try trick or treating, and she surprised me by not only listening to me, and staying close, but by following the kids, and trying to say trick or treat. She even held out her bag like a pro. It took her a few doors before she realized what the point was, and then she was off. I wanted some shots of the other kids going door to door, but they were just too fast for me and Tayzia!

This is what it looked like from my angle, she was running ahead trying to catch the others, and I was just trying to make sure she stayed on the sidewalk! She gave up her raincoat after a few houses, because it was just too much. Good thing about Okinawan rain, it's usually not cold!

We had been out for a little over an hour with light showers, but then it just started to pour! It was bad enough that we just decided to head home, so we strapped the little kids down in the strollers, and told the older ones to head to my house. We hurried as fast as we could, got in, and took a shot of our drowned rats! Everyone got to dry off a bit, and once the rain subsided enough we drove MaryAnn and her kids home, so they wouldn't have to suffer through the rain again! Then we all had nice hot baths. At this point poor Tayzia did start to shiver, so she was immediately stripped, and put in a nice warm towel. The kids had so much fun! Then we stayed up extra late to look through our candy, and watch Hocus Pocus while waiting for Daddy to call and hear about our night!

Here's our masterpiece pumpkins. Tayzia's is the one on the left, it's was just supposed to be a fun design. Rylissa's is the little smiling pumpkin, mine is the big smiling pumpkin, and Corben's is the vampire pumpkin.

Even Daddy got in on the spirit of things. This is what I sent him in his Halloween box. I didn't take a picture before I sent it, but he did, so I swiped it off his Facebook page. We sent him some silly stuff, things he could use to decorate his room, and some cute foam frames the kids made for him. I'm going to print up pictures of the kids from Halloween and send them to him to put in the frames. He also got some Halloween lights, a fun voice changer, black light bulb, spiderwebs and some bags of candy to share. The most fun thing we sent him though, was his costume.......

I was happy to see he enjoyed it! Happy Halloween everyone!