Sunday, November 17, 2013

Trick-Or-Treat and Deck The Halls

It's that time of year again! September begins and people slowly trickle into fall decorations, pumpkin spice lattes, and apple orchards. October rolls around and people get to experience a change in weather (usually,) and the leaves change. Nice and slow and steady. The end of October brings Halloween, candy, costumes, and carving pumpkins.

Then, you wake up and BAM. It's Christmas time.

I went into a store on November 1st and there were decorations up and music playing.

Christmas creep is for real, people!

And in the spirit of, well, the holiday spirit, I thought I would join in by combining our Halloween and our decorating post into one post!

Aren't you so excited?

No? Enraged that I would dare combine the two? Or maybe just very confused why we have already decorated?

All in due time, my friends. All in due time.

After the girls afternoon nap, we headed over to Ian's parents' house for the afternoon and evening.

We carved a pumpkin for the first time with the girls. Grace wouldn't even touch it. And all Sophia wanted was a bottle. Still, Grace was pretty pleased with the results, a mickey shaped jack o lantern.


 We fed the girls a snack and then got them into their costumes. Precious, right?
 Obviously, Grace was Cinderella and Sophia was Minnie Mouse. Grace loves Cinderella so we thought that it was appropriate this year, ad we had been given Sophia's outfit, so free costume it was!


We headed out about 5:30, which was much sooner than other people, but I knew the girls weren't going to last long. At the first house we stopped at a spider fell from the ceiling and made some creepy noises but Grace just shrugged it off and focused on the task at hand- gathering as much candy as possible!



As soon as the door was open she would say "Trick or Treat!" and in the very instant that she was handed candy she would turn her head back to me and ask "More?" Sophia mainly stayed in the stroller and Grace would get a piece of candy for her and put it in her bucket above her head. Grace lasted until well after seven pm! We ended the night seeing some good family friends of ours and then headed back to the house for a late dinner from the grill.


 Grace topped the evening off by chowing down on some of her candy and gave out candy to the people who came to the door. We put the girls down and then we adults watched Monsters University! It was a great Halloween and I am so grateful that the girls got to have such a good experience!
It's pretty hard to believe that just one year ago our Halloween included this very busy bee and a one month old newborn!
Then, this weekend, we celebrated the start of the Christmas season with my in laws! We leave this week to head up to Tennessee to see my family for a couple of weeks and won't be back to Florida until mid December, so if we wanted to decorate together it was now or never!

So now it was!

I honestly didn't take many pictures. It was a crazy, beautiful kind of day. It was raining outside and Ian and his Dad hung up the outside Christmas lights. Grace "helped" assemble a snow man lawn ornament while my Mom in law and I put together the Christmas tree. Ian's brother and his wife arrived and they helped us wrangle the girls and string the lights on the tree. Then, once everyone came inside and were cleaned up and fed we put on a Christmas pandora station and put the ornaments on the tree. It only took ten minutes but it was so fun to see the girls' excitement!



I can't wait to do it all again with my family after Thanksgiving!  We get to do double the holidays this year!

3 comments:

Alison H said...

What an insane life we live....

Emily Powell said...

Look how much hair Grace has! I love it!

Lauren said...

Girl I can't imagine how many experiences you are trying to cram in during your seemingly short visit home! Glad you are getting to experience the holidays with both of your families!