::i see by your outfit that you are a jedi::

"I see by your outfit you are a jedi too....we see by our outfits that we are both jedis, if you get an outfit you can be a jedi too. Duh duh."

Anyway, here are our outfits.
These are pictures from the ward "trunk or treat" on saturday night.
We had loud star wars music and we used our big black car that reminds us all a bit of a spaceship.

Max is very serious with his obnoxious blaster as Luke the x-wing pilot. He still hasn't seen much of Star Wars, so don't grill him on any details. But we're working on that.


The whole family's theme was built around one thing. That Sandy had to be an ewok. I saw the costume online at some point and knew we had to do it.
And it was perfect. He was the most adorable ewok I've ever seen.



If you want to squish him and squeeze him that's ok. I don't know how you could want to do anything else!
He was a pretty good sport about his hood and only started pulling it off at the end of the night when he was pretty cranky. He's just a good sport generally--we're lucky. And he's adorable of course.

So that's us. We have some more halloween fun to report on tomorrow. But HAPPY HALLOWEEN tonight!

::crazy halloween craziness::

Yesterday (saturday) was an insane day of halloween activities.
Having the holiday fall on a sunday is a bit of a pain because instead of just one fun day of festivities, it's basically the whole weekend. But oh well. It's just those of us whose backs get tired, and the little ones who get oversugared and overtired that suffer I guess.
Anyway, we started the day by taking Max to his karate class--a preliminary strike against the later sugar high. I was hoping a little exercise would do him good.
Then Kris and Max came home, got ready, and headed out to the school halloween carnival. I opted out of that activity and stayed home.


(yes, Max looks like he's wearing some of those hillbilly teeth--that would be a great part of his costume--but unfortunately no, that's his real mouth. He keeps making this weird nerdy smile these days.)
Luckily for me I got to find out we had a mouse in the kitchen while they were gone. I was trying to be productive and was hoping to whip up batter for our traditional cookies. I got into the utensil drawer and found that a bunch of them had been chewed up. Ewwwwwww. Then I got to clean everything in the drawer. It was really fun, and a truly lovely addition to the day.

Off they go--it really looks like they're headed off into the savannah for a safari, doesn't it?

Then after they came back from the school party we had the church trunk or treat. Our costumes were really built around this event--We were explorers in an awesome old land rover. We had africanish music playing from the car and a fun fuzzy dog that we caught on our adventures tied in the back of the car.
And the best part? Moustaches. (Except me--all I had was a hat, but it worked.)



"I say, where can I go to shoot some big game??"

Kris won 2nd place in the costume contest. It wasn't too hard, considering that he was one of three men that dressed up. Plus the mustache is awesome.

The explorer and his beast.
I think the following three photos are pretty funny--sorry if it's mustache overkill.



Max looks like he has a little mustache envy.

We bowed out of the ward party early because we had to go buy all sorts of mouse traps and stuff--the thought of a mouse running through my kitchen was not doing a lot for me.
Then we went to our last event--we have a family in our neighborhood whose kid is in Max's class, and they bring all three of their kids into our office. They're awesome people and we really like them, so we couldn't miss their party even though we were SO tired.
So we went for an hour. By the time we were done there Max was in full meltdown mode. He was a floppy, screaming, exhausted disaster. So we went home. And my back was glad to be home too.
It was a crazy day. Crazy halloweeniness. And we didn't even get our cookies made or our pumpkins carved........

::school halloween parade::

At our last school Max wasn't even supposed to wear a costume, much less did they do anything to celebrate halloweeen. Out here in the west, however, it appears entirely kosher to go all out for halloween at school.
In fact, they spent at least the whole week leading up to it making crafts, playing games and learning about halloweeny things. The halls of the school were very festive with cute holiday art.
On friday the school had it's annual halloween parade. As usual with school, nobody told me when or where it would be until the day before, and I had to change some doctor's appts around and stuff, but I made sure to be there.
Max was a jedi for school--Luke I guess.

It was cute to see all the kids in their costumes. Also, I've been able to spend a little time in his classroom, so I'm finally getting to know the kids in his class which is nice too.

They lined up out in the hall and waited for all the big kids to parade past. And wow there were tons of kids that came by. I really didn't realize how dang big the school was until I saw the parade.

They had a hard time waiting their turn.
And though Max looks like he wasn't having that much fun, I have proof that he was:

See? He smiled. I'm not sure who he was smiling at, but he smiled.
They joined up with the end of the parade as it went by and we all marched out to the athletic field. I took up the rear to make sure nobody got lost, and it was a good thing I was there, because there were at least two kids that I had to literally push most of the way so that they would keep up. Classic 6 year old stuff.

There they went onto the field where they all lined up for a while and stood around. I'm not sure why, but oh well.
We took some pictures.
Of Luke Skywalker & Luke Skywalker especially.

I don't have any idea why they look so solemn. They definitely weren't!


Now that's more like it.

I like it when they get into character.

That's Max's teacher there on the right looking pretty groovy. He was so confused on why the teacher on the left would dress up "like a boy!!"

Then we all walked back to the school into the chaos of class halloween parties. I stayed and helped out and by the time it was over I was exhausted. Luckily friday is a short school day, so we got to leave at around noon. I think the kids had a great time. It was quite the kick-off for the entire weekend of halloween activities that we had to look forward too.
As of saturday night when I'm writing this I'm all halloweened out. Fun stuff, but you can only do so much.
But anyway, the parade was so fun. Lucky sugared up kids.

::halloween par-tay::

We hosted a little halloween party for all of the residents and their families. About half of us ended up coming--lots of people were out of town and such. But we had such a great time!

I started out with some fun decorations.

These bats turned out looking really fun.

Some party favors for the kids.

I made this ghost with my mom a long time ago. It's enjoying the blacklight we put up in our little mudroom/front hall area.

I made a big batch of the delicious Hendricks chocolate chip cookies--with peanut butter chips as well. Mmmm they were good.
The highlight of the treats though was Erica's homemade oreos. Wow were they good.

And easy to make too. So thanks for the recipe Erica!


Our first guests were Joanne and her girls Claire and Francie. Claire was a very cute ghost. I think Francie won the best costume award for the night. She was a garden gnome and it was a perfect costume for her. So cute.

Somehow I didn't get an official photo of Joanne, but she was a pirate. And looked pretty swashbuckling too.


Then came Brian. Looking awesomely like Dwight Schrute. I especially like the nunchucks. And all the gear hanging off his belt.


Then came the Boboias. Very excellent costumes. Bonnie was a very cute Bee, little Carson was an octopus, Vincent was an organic banana and Dan took the cake as Richard Simmons.


Then came Chad, Melissa and Grant. Melissa was a soccer player (which evidently is her classic costume), Chad was a referee, and Grant was a baby giraffe. A really cute one.
Max was a giraffe too. So we tried to get a picture of the baby giraffe and big giraffe together. Things were just a little too exciting though and all the kids were running all over the place.

Plus I couldn't really get back far enough to get everybody in the picture. And extra parts of people kept getting in the way.

For a second Grant forgot he was supposed to be a giraffe and thought he was a seal.

This one is really cute of Grant.

And here's the best I could do.
But much later we caught them both hanging out on the bed together.

They're buddies.

We ate and hung out.
Francie thought for a bit she was Santa Claus, and wanted all the babies in her lap. The funny thing is that the babies weren't that much smaller than her.


The kids had some fun in the blacklight. It made the fun vampire teeth from the favor bags glow very nicely. Max loved those teeth. He loved being a rabid giraffe.

Yikes!

I didn't get a good picture of me, but I was some sort of princess--like maybe an elf princess or something cool. Kris was a wizard. A cute one.

Here we are watching the movie we made especially for the party. It's a Max halloween movie. I'm going to post it here later. It was fun to make and Max loved showing it to everybody.


We ended the night with a little guitar hero. Some of those at the party hadn't ever gotten the chance to enjoy it before.

But it made the kids insane and so we stopped and everybody went home.
It was a great party and we were glad everybody could come, and that their costumes were so awesome. Yay for Halloween.