Thanksgiving is easier with two of everything!

Our first Thanksgiving in our big funky double kitchen! I will say it definitely comes in handy to have two of all kitchen appliances at the holidays. I cooked a turkey AND a ham! Everyone was happy! 

 Kelly even tried some of the turkey, a true miracle!

 We had a pretty good crowd. Watched football, ate ourselves silly and had a great time.

Loads of Halloween Fun!

With 5 full weekends in October this year, I made it a point to schedule loads of seriously fun Halloween activities! For some reason, Halloween is one of my very favorite holidays. I just love it! And Kelly seemed pretty excited this year too. 

We kicked off the first weekend by heading to our local little Pumpkin Station pumpkin patch in Del Mar with her buddies Krysta, Skye, Caspian & Cyrus. They have kiddie rides, jumpys, a train ride, a petting zoo and lots of great pumpkins for photo ops! I will be sad when she outgrows this place, we always have a great time there!

As always, sometime in mid-August, I started to have a little trepidation thinking about how the costume thing would all go down this year (see previous 2 years Halloween posts!). She started with wanting to be a cowgirl, but when I showed her some potential costumes, she turned up her nose. She then proclaimed that this year she wanted to be SCARY! So for a while she was saying she would be a ghost. I finally talked her out of that one.

"But honey, then your head and face have to stay covered up the whole time so that people believe you are a ghost...you wanna walk around with a sheet on for a bit and see what you think?" 

She didn't even need to try it, she saw the light without the test run. I decided maybe she was old enough that we could go to the costume store and look together for something (it sooo overwhelming when they are little! yeah, for ME!) We tried a couple fairy-like costumes. She didn't like them. She saw a cutsey lady bug one, but they were out of her size... I reminded her that she said she wanted to be SCARY this year, and as if the fog were lifted away, she said, "OH YEAH That's RIGHT!" 

Then she saw the Bat Girl costume. Her eyes lit up, she jumped around pointing at it saying, I wanna be BAT GIRL!!! 

"Honey, Krysta was Bat Girl last year, and I bet she still has the costume. Do you want to just, em, borrow it from her?" 

"YEAH MOM!!! I wanna borrow Krysta's BAT GIRL costume!!! YAY!!! Call Miss Michele RIGHT NOW!!!" 

So we high-fived each other as I pulled out my cell phone and walked out of the Party City having spent an hour, but not even a dime.... yessss!

So our little angels this year went from ballerinas, princesses, and fairies to Goth, gore and darkness! Mu-ha-ha! She had plenty of BATITUDE too!

First stop, Legoland's Brick or Treat Nights...we were thinking it might be pretty crazy crowded, but it wasn't too bad, and it was really fun - the decorations were awesome and they had lots of great entertainment. We had a super fun time - highly recommend!

 
Next, we took our first visit ever trip to Bate's Nut Farm.... ok, so now we've been there done that. It was fun, but I probably won't need to do that again. It was soooo ridiculously crowded! And really hot that day too, which probably didn't help matters. But we enjoyed and had fun regardless.

 We went to our first combined kid AND adult costume party at one of her classmate's (and fellow bunco babe mom's) house. All her school and Daisy friends were there and they had a blast! (as did the parents I will say) In preparation I got all domestic and made these pumpkin cake pops. They didn't look exactly like the cover photo of my Family Circle mag, but they were still a huge hit with the kids!

Next up, a visit to a haunted house, which is put on by the Boys Scouts every year in this old historic farmhouse in Olivenhein. I was not sure how Kelly would handle it. They take it easy on the little kids, but still some of the rooms were pretty gruesome & scary. But she was a total trooper, in fact, I think I screamed way more than she did. She is really digging the scary stuff this year!

 I continued my domestic bent through the month and made another recipe from my Family Circle mag, a cemetary cake. YUM!

 Finally, THE night we had been actually celebrating for weeks now, Halloween!!! (which was on a MONDAY night and was the day all the kids went BACK to school after a two-week fall break. Brilliant!) We went trick-or-treating with our usual gang in our usual little neighborhood behind Leucadia Oaks park where auntie Lynda lives. They had a blast and got ridiculous amounts of candy. All-in-all, it was a spectacular Halloween month!