October Southwest Style

I'm still way behind on our blog. But I figure its October, so posting about last October is semi-relevant right?

Halloween is my all time favorite. Living in Arizona we experienced some fall festivities in a whole new way....like the swimming pool pumpkin patch. 

The kids with their pumpkins (and no Carder doesn't have a black eye). There were all these activity booths set up around the perimeter of the pool and just my luck--the first one he went to was a Nacho Libre one where they gave him a nice faux shiner with ink, so his eye looked like this in all of my pictures (sigh).

You literally jumped into the pool and swam over to your pumpkin.

Once they picked their pumpkins they went to a little booth where they could decorate it, and since stickers are pretty much one of my kids' favorite things in the whole wide world, Carder was all over that action.

It was SUPER hot, so the pool was perfect (though it didn't really give me my traditional fall pumpkin patch feel). The kids loved swimming, playing games and getting their glitter tattoos.

Now that we had the pumpkins, we had to carve them. (Excuse the underwear/diaper, its just much easier to clean pumpkin pulp off their tummies than it is to get the orange gunk out of clothes).

Carder loved reaching in the pumpkins and scooping out all the insides.

Each of the kids picked out a templet online for their pumpkin. Carder's was an angry bird and Brenn's was Cinderella.

We had so much fun making all of our festive treats and packing Carder a special Halloween lunch. Jake and I also got to go to two awesome "adult only" Halloween parties where we rocked Cruella Deville and her dalmatian costumes.

There were parties galore. First we went to our ward party. Carder had picked out a Superman costume this year but Brenn had a few costumes in her stash, so she decided to be wonder woman so I pulled out the ol' Batgirl costume from college and joined in the superhero fun.

We were terrible at snapping pictures here, so we tried to get a group one when we got home and the one on the top right basically sums up how that went...

While the big kids were at school on Halloween there was a little ghost parade for the little people. Brenn decided to wear her witch costume this day; though when you asked her what she was, she would tell you "Pumpkin Princess". 

Halloween night the kids were troopers. The kids almost did an entire neighborhood. (Carder was the one who asked to be done, I think Brenn could have kept going). We went with some friends and had a blast. After trick or treating we went over to some other friends' house for a little Halloween party. Halloween was a big success and once again fueled my love for the month of October!

Here are some pics of the kids in their Halloween costumes....

The Pumpkin Princess

Superman

My attempts to get a picture of both kids looking and smiling at me was a pipedream. However, I captured pretty accurate and hilarious depictions of their personalities.