31 days of Halloween

I'm not sure that there is a three-year-old boy as enthusiastic about Halloween as Mr. E. His excitement is contagious which is why we are finding ourselves celebrating Halloween all month long again. Following the weekend of large Halloween cake building we headed down to Dallas for a little weekend visit with our friends. My friend K and I have been planning a girl's weekend for about 6 months now and we finally managed to escape "out of town" for a little shopping at Ikea (Mom thanks for joining us for that one), eating cupcakes, crafting ("curse you sparkly bones"), eating out, and staying up WAY too late talking all without children. I had a blast-- Thank you so much K! Also, giant thanks to our sweet husbands for wrangling the kiddos. You guys are studs. We took advantage of inexpensive flights from DFW to MCO and went on a somewhat spontaneous, very quick trip to go to the mouse's Not So Scary Halloween Party and eat at the International Food and Wine Festival. I know-- we have a problem. The kids were super excited about getting all dressed up, particularly E who had been telling me exactly what he wanted his costume to look like this year (he's wore the pirate pants every day of the trip and has put them all at least once every day since). Oh wait, I almost forgot about the parrot that he demanded be present on his shoulder. As a side note, E was doing this weird thing with his lips pretty much the whole night because he though if he relaxed his face his "pirate paint" would fall off. There was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise.

Miss A is supposed to be little red ridding hood. The thing is her hood isn't very little so she ended up looking a little goth. Oh well. This is what the kids looked like when we arrived at the party ... ...although it wasn't long before they were excited about the action. What made this trip different from all past is that E was finally tall enough to ride a few of the rides with height restrictions. We started off with Big Thunder Mountain and then quickly moved to Splash Mountain. The next day he got to be a test dummy on Test Track and glided through the air on Soarin'. It wasn't until the third day that he finally got to ride "the scary broken elevator, AHHHHHHH with ghosts and falling faster faster, AHHHHHH" known to the rest of us as Tower of Terror. After it was all over I asked him, "Was that scary or fun?" and he of course said "FUN!". Crazy kid. A few days after we got home we continued the celebration by going to our church Halloween party (sorry no pictures) and then a week later attempted to go to a community flashlight pumpkin hunt only to find out that by being 11 minutes late we'd missed it entirely. We did however get a few pics.

Less than a week of celebrating. Stay tuned for how we've made the most of it.