Halloween highlights

It's Halloween Eve.  That means only one more day of costuming kiddos (just kidding--I really do love this time of year even though it's a lot of work).  Tomorrow we'll have the school parade, class parties and I imagine we'll do some neighborhood trick-or-treating in the evening.  So maybe I should be waiting to post something until it's all over...  Oh well.  Here are some highlights of the past couple of weeks that have been Halloween.

Pumpkin patch.  We tried out our first year with a CSA share.  East Farms in Layton, UT supplied us weekly boxes of vegetables and, as a close to the season, invited us to come pick pumpkins at the farm.  It was fun to finally see where all our vegetables had come from.  We took home seven pumpkins to add to the two we had grown in our own garden.  That on top of all the winter squash we've been eating this fall (and the several still waiting in our pantry to be eaten) and I'm practically dreaming in orange.

Here was an early neighborhood Halloween party.  RVC and TLC were only partly decided on what they wanted to be this year, but we managed to pull a few things together.

Papa's Halloween Party fell over UEA weekend this year while Holly's family was in town.  We were lucky to find a brief window when no kids were sick to have a fun party.  Papa gets the credit for this party, but rumor has it that Grams and Aunt Holly put in quite a bit of work to make it a success.

Halloween fun for which we have no photos:  We made it to the law offices of Prince Yeates & Geldzehler last Friday to do some trick-or-treating with all the scary attorneys.  The kids love going to Dad's work and look forward to that part of Halloween.  Afterwards, we snuck in a quick trip to the Fairmont Aquatic center to use up some free passes before they expired.  We only had an hour to swim before the pool closed, but it turned out that we were the only people there and had the whole pool and water slide to ourselves!  Pretty fun.

Saturday night was our ward Halloween party.  I even dressed up for that one--Olive Oyl with little MEC as Sweet Pea.  Too bad Popeye had to miss the party; he was busy cheering at the Utah football game.  I'm blaming our lack of photos from the party on the fact that I was playing it solo that night:)

Today we carved pumpkins after church.  Seven pumpkins is a lot of pumpkins.  We'll have quite the collection of Jack-o-lanterns tomorrow night.  We actually only carved six; we decided to save Dad's green-turning orange pumpkin.  And we used one of the big pumpkins for our pumpkin stew, which turned out yummy.  It was fun to have Grandma and Grandpa over to help us eat it.

Those kids sure look excited to eat pumpkin stew! :)