a real life Halloween.

Another Halloween is in the books for the Halls! There were some moments when we tried and there were some when we just didn't. Haha and I'm sure we'll just try less and less as the years go by, right?

Let's start with what we didn't try with.

Our costumes. Really we didn't. Todd and I already had our costumes from the premiere of Harry Potter 7.2 and we borrowed Peter's lion costume and scarf. Okay so I made Calvin's little mandrake hat but seriously we didn't try too hard. And it showed as our award winning costume streak ended this year. The last two years were pretty solid with our Cloudy w/ a Chance of Meatballs theme and then our Frankestein theme. Turns out people know a lot less about Harry Potter than expected. I'm going to say it's because we're younger than the MBA crowd but older than our ward crowd so no one that we hang with falls into that window of excessive Harry Potter geekdom.

Anyhow. If you're about our age you probably hopefully know who we're dressed up as.

We I did try with the soup and chili cook-offs though! We took Mel's Butternut Squash and Coconut Curry Soup with Shrimp and Rice Noodles to our ward party and we took Angelyn Baumgartner's chili to the MBASA party. Do I know who Angelyn is? Nope... but my aunt passed on her recipe so I should at least give her some credit right? Maybe I should take her my golden ladle that we won.

We kind of tried with pumpkin carving. We basically ran out of evenings to carve them and Thursday night we whipped these babies out. Peter requested a lion, Todd carved a Pelican (go team!), and mommy held Calvin... then did a heart-eyes emoji face that took about 2 minutes. Sweet.

We decided to keep our actual Halloween pretty low-key. And by low-key I mean go from stake soccer to intramural volleyball to sushi burrito to the temple to making a big ol' mess of the kitchen to make our Halloween dinner. Usually there's some party going down on Halloween. Ya know... chili and cornbread and a trunk-or-treat. Not this year! So we did our own thing. A pumpkin bake!

I had seen some pumpkin bakes floating around the interwebs and thought it'd be fun to try out. And it was!

It tasted pretty good too! Basically a cream cheesy chicken and rice casserole baked inside of a pumpkin.

We also tried with these pudding cups. And they just didn't want to work out. The pudding was tasty (and homemade #thankyouverymuch) but those darn rolos would not stick to the cups no matter what we tried. Oh well. p.s. I learned that Todd loves box pudding. So yeah next time we'll go the easy route. (:

There you go... our Halloween adventures for the year! It was loads of fun and really I think Peter had a blast and that's what really matters. I mean heck, he got to wear his costume like 10 times. And it was an easy costume... which made it a blast for me too. (:

Happy Halloween!

date day in

Last Friday my boys and I had a very fun day. Todd had the car in Ogden, you see, so technically we were stuck at home all day. Cooped up. With potential to go stir-crazy. For reals... we stay too busy every other day running errands, going to the library, doing MBASA stuff, etc. so without the car we were in for it. Todd even checked and checked and checked again that it was okay that we'd be without the car. Little did he know that I was actually really excited about it. We were practically being forced to take it easy and I was pretty pumped!

Since Todd and I would be having a date night out that evening I thought it would be fun to have a "date day in" with Peter and Calvin. And so a date day in we had!

We started the morning just like we start every other morning... cartoons and breakfast at 6am. At least I'm pretty sure that's what happens. Daddy is up already and takes care of all of that. I usually join the party with Mr. Calvin around 7:30 depending on how well Calvin slept. Anyhow... 

Our first activity of the day was a little baking fun. Todd and I needed to take a treat on our date so Peter helped me make s'more bars. He was a great helper and I love that he always wants to be a helper in the kitchen. He even wanted to help me over watching Wild Kratts. Now that's a complement! On that note... we watch one of Peter's friends everyday for a few hours and everyday without fail they have the conversation about where their mommies are and that I'm Peter's mommy, etc. Today Peter said, "This is my mommy, she is my friend!"

My heart! He likes me!

So yeah we made those s'more bars together because we're friends... and they turned out great!

Let's be honest... he just likes to help so he can lick all of the spoons.

While our bars was cooling we went on a run. We saw the usual horsies, puppies, birdies... and the garbage truck! Always a treat. (:

Later on after nap time we played with friends at the park and went down to the safety fair to watch a helicopter land on the softball field. Last year the helicopter was too busy and couldn't come so we were pretty excited when they announced that it was on it's way!

It flew a few circles around us then made it's landing. The kids got to look inside and sit in the seats until it had to leave on another rescue mission. (We're all about "to the rescue" at our house right now thanks to Wild Kratts and Superman.)

Thus ended our date day in. Looking back it wasn't much, but it was still fun to set everything else aside and focus solely on my boys and making them extra happy for the day.

And because I know you're all wondering about the date night out... it pretty much went like this...

Plus a little Piano Man, Frozen, Aretha Franklin, and so forth. I can confidently say that my nerves about karaoke were successfully put at ease and the ice between me and karaoke has been broken haha.