Happy Halloween!

 Happy Halloween from a friendly witch, buzzing bumblebee and adorable watermelon!  The Girl and Lil Sis have never been big on door-to-door trick-or-treating so this year we kept it simple and went to the Trunk-or-Treat at our church instead.

 Oh how I love this little watermelon!  I got this costume a while back, on sale at Children's Place for...$15!!!  It will probably go down in history as my favorite store-bought Halloween costume ever.  Hands down.  But when I first showed it to Baby Miss she looked at it with disdain and exclaimed, "I not like!"  Oh brother, seriously!  Are not-quite-two-year-olds allowed to formulate opinions on super awesome costumes that their Mommas pick out for them?!  I think not.  At any rate, she quickly caught on to the realization that people give candy to costume-clad kids and then she was all too eager to get into her costume, even the hat!  She kept saying, "I melon." And her "trick-or-treat" was to die for.  If I were a stranger and she came to my door, I'd have just dumped my entire bowl of candy in her pumpkin.  J thought that the hat looked like a beret and therefore she became the French watermelon or, "Zie Vater-mel-ohn."

 A few of our pals prior to the trunk-or-treating.

 This sweet bee was as cute as can be...

 but was afraid to leave the safety of our trunk.  She much preferred passing candy out to getting it. She only trick-or-treated at a few familiar adjacent trunks while holding my hand in a death-grip before retreating back to our car.

 This friendly witch was quick to make the rounds and then spent the rest of the evening being goofy with friends.

 And Zie Vater-mel-ohn ate a lot of candy and thoroughly enjoyed it.  So much so...

that she had no problem doing a bit of trick-or-treating around the neighborhood...

while her Big Sisters cheered her on.

Shades

A girl can never have too many pairs of sunglasses...

Eighty-two...

the number of drafts waiting to be written and posted, dated as far back as April 11th of last year!  Times that number by two and you have the number of blog posts that I probably meant to write and never even got around to setting up a draft in my blog editor.  That's a lot of catching up to do!  And, I do intend to get caught up...eventually.  I plan on easing back into things and filling in the blanks of all those back-logged draft posts as best as I can eventhough many of the details may be lost forever in the far reaches of my memory.  You might've been wondering, "What happened?"  As best I can tell - life.  Life happened.  No guarantees that it won't prevent me from keeping up with this little blog in the future {especially, say, come next spring} but for now, I'm back.  Or at least, I hope to be.

Pumpkin Carving

 We finally got to the business of carving our pumpkins late this afternoon.  We figured if it didn't get done today, it wouldn't get done at all.

 Inevitably, J gets stuck with most of the grunt work.  Especially as this one seemed to enjoy cleaning out the gook when she was much, much younger.  Back then she couldn't care less if it got on her or her clothes...now, not so much.

 Although this year Little Sister did a pretty darn good job of cleaning her pumpkin out.  After she was finished, there wasn't much left for him to do other than carve out a much larger version of a 'kitty face' than what she'd drawn.

 Baby Miss did pretty good too, although she lacked the elbow grease to really get the job done.

 Of course my job is 'official photographer.'

Baby Miss enjoyed drawing on the pumpkins.  She started out with hers and then proceeded to leaver her mark on everyone else's as well.  And apparently, the 'official photographer' dropped the ball when it came to capturing the finished products.

Roughing It

This weekend the Girl and I left the Sisters with Daddy and headed out for a weekend campout with the Girl's Girl Scout troop.  It was fun, as being the oldest, she rarely gets my undivided attention for more than a few minutes at a time these days.  Of course, not that she really wanted it this weekend when she had 12 other girls (none of which were her sisters) to play with.  So, I got to spend quite a bit of time relaxing as we were 'camping out' in a 'cabin' fully equipped with a kitchen, running water and heat.  It was rough, for sure!

Sleepover

Tonight, Baby Miss fell asleep in Little Sister's bed.  As of late she has been quite interested in sleeping in a big bed and after we do our reading she climbs right up into Lil Sis's bed.  Usually I just pluck her, crying from the bed and take her to her crib in her own room.  A few nights ago, I let her give it a try but after just a few minutes it became quite clear that it wasn't going to work.  So tonight when she crawled up and snuggled in with a book I figured that we'd have the same results.  I went off to read to the Girl and after a few pages with no interruptions from Lil Sister to tell me that Baby Miss was keeping her awake, I realized that it had grown awfully quiet down the hall.  I went to check and this is what I found.  Both of them fast asleep and Baby Miss with a book on her face.  Awww, so sweet!  There she remained for a few hours until I transferred her to the crib.  There's no telling what she'd get into when she woke up and I didn't want to find out.

Keeping it real.

I love this Girl.  This morning she requested a piece of toast with her oatmeal.  Ever since the coils on one side of our toaster burned out a while back {combined with my frugality}, making a piece of toast is a process in our house.  Monitoring and rotation is involved. This morning during the 'process' I was going back and forth from the toaster in the kitchen to the computer on my desk.  The toast popped and it had burned.  I buttered the unburnt side and gave it to her {totally unacceptable to a certain toast-loving friend who recently blogged about her addiction to the perfectly toasted piece of bread spread with butter and drenched with honey}, wondering if it would work.  It didn't.  She immediately gave me a look and informed me that it was burnt.  She readily agreed to my offer of a new piece and as I was popping the slice of bread into the toaster she said with a grin, "Maybe you should stay in the kitchen and watch it."  Indeed.  She's always calling me out and keeping it real.

Making room...

for one more.
Come April this little one will complete our family.

Pumpkin Patch

 This afternoon we hit the local farm, our annual trip to the pumpkin patch in search of the perfect {for us} pumpkins.  When we left the house traces of the sun peeked from behind menacing clouds.  When we arrived less than 10 minutes later we were met by sprinkles of rain.  By the time we'd reached the barnyard animals it was a downpour.

 Luckily, by the time we were finished admiring the peacocks, bunnies, chickens, goats and one very woolly sheep, the rain had all but subsided and we continued down to the pumpkin patch to begin the methodical search of just what we were looking for.

 Little Sister wanted a pumpkin with green on it, the Girl was looking for the classic 'perfectly round' pumpkin, I wanted a tall pumpkin, {not sure exactly what J was looking for but whatever it was, he found it} and Baby Miss gave a "no" accompanied by a shake of her head to every pumpkin that the Girl and Miss Allie brought for her inspection until they found a little peanut-shaped one which she agreed upon.  A happy coincidence as we call her "little peanut" quite often.

 Of course we were there with our usual suspects.

All the kids in one picture, that rarely happens!

And apparently, Baby Miss has a serious aversion to sitting on hay bales.