I definitely can’t gloss over Halloween!  It’s probably my favorite holiday.  I’m guessing 99% of America says Christmas is their favorite holiday, so I like to be a little different!  I also think carving pumpkins is fun and the kids are getting pretty good at it!

This year I had the opportunity to volunteer in Reece’s 1st grade class for a pumpkin project.  They divided into groups and predicted which pumpkins had the most seeds, then we counted the seeds and decorated the pumpkins.  Reece’s group did a Mummy – super cute huh!?

Each year I always attend the school’s costume parade and volunteer for the school parties and I’m in love with my little peacock and T-Birds!!  Sometimes the boys need some ideas of what to be for Halloween so I made the suggestion to be T-Birds!  I pretty much just thought they would look cute in those outfits, it wouldn’t cost me anything, and I love Grease.  It came with a little reluctance, so I picked up the movie for $4 at Target and we watched it (with some fast-forwarding).  They liked the movie and were on board to transform into T-Birds!  Yaaaay to me for escaping their desire to wear boring morph suits for Halloween!  You know what those are right…those leotard things that are all one color and cover your entire body including  your face so you can’t see who it is.  I will never understand the point of those!!

My T-Birds are way more cool and handsome than the real ones, right!?

On Halloween night, we host a family Halloween party.  It’s super fun and awesome!  Years ago we started doing a Halloween-themed food contest where participants make some sort of a spooky dish.  We vote on our favorites and decide on a winner!  The contest is growing and becoming even more awesome because my kids are creating their own dishes now too.  I LOVE this!  Here are Jake and Drew making theirs…

Morgan always does an amazing job.  She may have a future as a pastry chef…she made these spider web cupcakes completely on her own!!  How she has time to fit this into her schedule is incredible to me.!? You rock MoMo!

Here are a few of the other awesome spooky edible creations…

And the the winners were the spooky owls, bark with a bite, and spider web cupcakes!  Despite my dad’s adamant  belief that the scoring system is flawed…he’s in charge of the scoring next year (even though he doesn’t even create a spooky dish!)

We had a wonderful time trick-or-treating in the neighborhood – it was a nice, but very windy night which is not ideal for peacock feathers!  And we all discovered that the pièce de résistance of Halloween night is if you score a FULL SIZE CANDY BAR!  They already have their routes planned for next year!  I personally don’t understand what the big deal is…I say just eat 4 or 5 small candy bars and that equals a full size one!  As you can see, I don’t practice any restraint at all when it comes to eating candy on Halloween!

Bye Bye Halloween…see you next year (and by then, we might still have candy from this year…we hit the jackpot!)

Wishing all of you full-size candy bars and an amazing fall season with family and friends.