30 days of Graditude

It is now November, the month of Thanksgiving! I've made a goal to blog every day in the month of November about something I am grateful for. I've noticed how much happier I feel when I concentrate on things I have been blessed with, instead of things that I don't have.

Today, I am thankful for holidays. Yesterday was Halloween and we had a really fun holiday. It started with our ward Trunk or Treat on Wednesday. There was a costume parade around the gym.

This is the only picture of Mckay's costume that I managed to get. Any guesses?

He's a man on a windy day. See the newspaper stuck to his leg? And there was an inverted umbrella to go with the costume too. Pretty clever.

One of the cars in the Trunk-or-treat was decorated with a pirate theme with the people and dogs dressed at pirates. 

The kids got to dig in the sand for buried "treasure" with a number on it, and that told how many pieces of candy each child would get.

On Halloween day, Dallin had a "fall" party at preschool. To make it non-scary, they requested that everyone dress as a book character or an occupation. Dallin dressed up as Handyman.

He called himself "Handy Manny" from the Disney channel show.

I love his pose, with one foot up.

For dinner, we made homemade pizza. I usually make this once a week, but this time we made individual pizzas and I let the boys make their own.

Growing up, we often had mini english muffin pizzas and clam chowder on Halloween night. Others have remarked on that being a weird dinner combination, but it sounds perfectly normal to me! 

I turned on a Pandora Halloween station and we listened to spooky music while we made dinner. Connor was really good about putting the toppings on the pizza, but Dallin kept sneaking bites of olives and pepperoni. And cheese.

 After dinner, we got the boys dressed in costumes.

Dallin brought back the Mariachi player from Cinco de Mayo. Connor was Batman. I realize that it's not an accurate costume with the red cape and blue eye mask, but Connor liked it. He got these Batman pajamas for his birthday. He LOVES them and wants to wear them all the time, so we let it be his Halloween and costume and dressed it up with his cape and mask, also from his birthday.

 It was a wet, rainy day, but it managed let up for a few hours in the evening for trick or treating.

Connor loved splashing through the puddles as we walked from house to house. Both boys did really well and had a lot of fun. One of the last houses we stopped at had an animatronic skeleton/zombie guy with a motion sensor so it moved when you approached the house. The sensor wasn't working well so it didn't turn on to scare the boys. Good. But the middle aged woman passing out the candy thought it would be a good idea to activate the skeleton and show it to my very young children who already seemed apprehensive about it. (She may have been drunk...) All the skeleton did was lift his head and move an arm, but that was enough for both boys to clutch me in terror, and Connor screamed and cried. I carried him the next 20 houses til we got home. He managed to stop crying, but would still whimper every minute or so, "Skeleton...get....me..." I told him he could eat a few pieces of candy and that seemed to cheer him up.

This is their combined stash from trunk-or-treat, preschool party and Halloween night.

 They kept finding and opening more candy. In this picture, Connor has two suckers in his mouth at once. Later in the night he had three at once. 

Watching a Thomas the Tank Engine Halloween movie and eating candy: this boy is in heaven!

Even though I'm not a big Halloween person, I like the opportunity to do something different. Life can get kind of dull sometimes, so I like to have holidays and new seasons to get excited about. It's fun to decorate and plan out costumes. It makes a regular weekday meal more exciting. It gets me to loosen up and do fun things with my children. I'm glad that we have holidays.