Fall

 We have a crazy amount of trees in our yard.  The kids had a blast jumping in them and spreading them back out on the grass while Ben tried to rake them up.

 There is a head attached to that helmet...

 Mid-jump! Yes!

 Why yes, we always make our kids wear helmets when they play in the leaves.

Sammi is such a copycat

Love these kids!

Love These Little Faces!

The Festivities

 For some reason every year, I forget what pumpkin carving entails.  I think it's going to be this wonderful, short-ish family activity where everyone has a great time and we end the night with a cute Halloween movie while eating roasted pumpkin seeds.

Not so.

The reality is, it dissolved into us pleading with our kids to just touch the pumpkin guts once, just once, and then we promised we'd hollow out the rest.  So this picture with the pumpkin guts scooper was fake.  Totally fake.  Emerson just likes running around with the tools, and that includes the little saws.  Don't worry though, we drew the line at the butcher knives we used to cut the zig-zag tops off the pumpkins.

"Don't make me touch the guts!"

 We finally got all four pumpkins hollowed out, and then we set about choosing designs.  Sammi wanted Ariel AND Tiana AND Cinderella on hers.  Mom isn't that patient, so I chose just plain Ariel for her.  And did she help me carve it?  No.  Emerson chose some vampire demon thing for his design.  Before he settled on that though, he also liked about 20 designs, so Daddy helped him choose.  He sincerely wanted to help Dad carve, and he helped a little, but then both kids ended up on couch while we kept hitting "play" on another Jake and the Neverland Pirates episode.  Meanwhile, I kept grumbling about how cheap they make the little pumpkin-carving saws and tools.  I swear they used to be better quality and didn't so easily bend in half.  (Did I mention the night deteriorated quickly?)

 About 7 hours later (ok, 2) we were finished with the kids' pumpkins.  And look! They are in their jammies!  Makes sense though since it seemed like it was about the middle of the night by this time.

Yay, Ariel!

Yay, Dracula demon thing!

So to finish out the night, we put the kids in bed and finished carving our own pumpkins.  And we did have roasted pumpkin seeds, but they weren't done roasting until midnight.  I'm serious.  It only takes like an hour to roast them, but we had so many that they wouldn't all fit in the oven at the same time.  (Now that I wrote that, it sounds like we had loose pumpkin seeds busting out the seams of our oven.)  We only have 2 racks in our miniature easy-bake-size oven, and those pans were filled to capacity.

To pass the time until the blasted seeds were roasted, we read Mockingjay together.  (I know, we are so behind to not have finished the series, but we are getting there!  Don't you dare spoil the ending.)  Then I pulled the dang seeds out and we collapsed into bed.  I think next year we might paint our pumpkins, or at least draw jack-o-lantern faces on with a Sharpie.

The Costumes

Our silly little Wall-E

Our gorgeous Ariel

Happy Halloween!

Disneyland 2012

 We surprised the kids with a trip to Disneyland this week.  The word to sum it up: MAGICAL.  I know that probably sounds cliche, but it truly was magical for us.

We were originally going to take a different trip with my family to San Diego, but there were some miscommunications between all of us, and we ended up having to change some plans around.  The good news was that my dad got to come with us, but the bad news was that my mom and Steph didn't get to come. :(  They get to go see Nat in Boston this week instead!

We drove and drove and drove to California, and got there just in time to enjoy the beach before picking my dad up from the airport.  It was my kids' first time, and they thought it was great.

So excited to finally use those beach toys on the beach!

Had a blast chasing the seagulls around

 Newport Beach brought back a lot of memories from about 10 years ago when I went with my best girlfriends in high school and we got pulled out to sea on our boogieboards by the rip current and the lifeguards had to rescue us.  So embarrassing.

We finally told our kids the morning that we were actually going to the park.  Up to that point, we just said we were going to stay at a hotel and that we had a surprise for them.  They were very excited, and it was nice that they didn't know about it before that so they weren't asking us every five minutes of the ten hour drive.  We spent the next 3 days playing hard in the park and sleeping like rocks at night.

We rode The Little Mermaid ride, and then we rode it about 8 more times while we were there.  Sammi adored it obviously, since Ariel is her favorite princess.  She got very nervous about Ursula, and would bury her head in your lap, peek once, then bury her head again.

Right after the Ariel ride.  Mind blown.

 On the ferris wheel

Emerson hating the characters. I don't blame him.  They make me nervous too sometimes.

Cars Land!

 Cars Land was way awesome, but way busy.  It was difficult to get on the racers since the wait was so long, but the other two were pretty easy and lots of fun.

She got so exhausted that she fell asleep in the middle of eating her snack.

Cheeser

Terrible picture of me.  But Mater was cool because he actually drove around.

Sammi was terrified of Lightning McQueen

Disneyland!

Buddies

The magical moment.

Belle

Ti-nana as Sammi calls her

Merida

Snow White

Cigewwy (Cinderella)

The kids laughed and laughed while they bounced with Tigger.  That's why E is blurry.

They LOVED Pooh Bear.  This is E's second time meeting his hero, but he doesn't remember the last time because he was only 18 months.  I will admit I got teary when my kids met their heroes.

Minnie

Mickey

We were so glad to have Grandpa J with us on the trip!  He enjoyed spoiling the children, and we enjoyed his company.  It worked really well to have 3 adults and 2 kids because we could trade off and use the Parent Swap passes so we all got to ride what we wanted.  Mostly we just enjoyed going with the kids though.  As I kept telling myself, "They have no expectations.  They have never been here before, and they will think anything is great."  

 I would say that the most magical moment of the whole trip was when we were watching the World of Color show and they projected Ariel on the wall of mist and played her song and Sammi belted out every word of the song while sitting on Ben's shoulders.  I cried.  I really did.  Then I cried again when they showed a picture of Wall-E and E got all excited since he pretends to be Wall-E half of the time.  

Our trip was just about the right length.  We were ready to go, but sad to leave at the same time.  I was not looking forward to the long drive home, and it ended up being really difficult with Sammi who turned out to have an ear infection, but we survived.  

Overall, definitely worth the money and time spent.

 On the drive home, we took a little detour to Richfield to visit Grandma Christensen.

They read stories

Had good naps

Really good naps

 And she took us to the Pumpkin Patch and out to dinner!

We love you Great Grandma Chris!