Anyone wanna play pool?

John and I went to a Halloween party on Saturday night. After trying to think up a creative, easy, and cheap costume that utilized my baby bump, we came up with the following. I already had felt in all the of the colors we needed. So the total cost was less that $1.00 (the poster board). It took less than 1 hour to put together. Also bonus points for being able to wear sweatpants all night :) What more can you ask for?

I was an 8 ball

And John was a cue stick

We had a great time at the party. Happy Halloween!

Pumpkin guts

And the Halloween fun begins...

This afternoon Anabelle and I went to a special outdoor Halloween story time that they had on the Riverwalk in Naperville. It was held at the amphitheater and they had dancing, stories, songs, and a puppet show. Here is a shot of the crowd, a lot of kids came out for the event. It was fun to see all of the kids dressed up, we saw quite a few kids also wearing cow costumes.

When we first got there they had music playing and all the kids were dancing. I asked Anabelle if she wanted to dance, thinking she would dance in the area right in front of me-but she had other plans. She made her way through the crowd and went right down to the emcee (the librarian), grabbed her hand and started to dance. She is so brave sometimes!

Back in our seats, we settled in to listen to the stories.

We had a great time, events like this are why I like Naperville. (despite my thinking I never would)

Then this evening after dinner we carved our pumpkin. This is the first time that we have carved a pumpkin with Anabelle. She seemed to like it, and did a pretty good job of cleaning out the pumpkin guts.

Anabelle only can stay interested in something for so long, so we decided to keep the design pretty simple. While John worked on the cutting, Anabelle and I played with the guts.

Our jack-o-lantern!

Paper bag puppet

Some friends from the play group we've joined invited us over today for craft time with our kids. Anabelle and I had a great time making a paper bag puppet. Anabelle has just recently become interested in arts and crafts. She liked coloring her puppet and especially liked using the glue stick to attach the eyes, nose, tongue and arms. She definitely reached her point when she wanted to be done working, and that's fine, we'll start small. Of course when we got home she liked playing with it for about 10 minutes and then proceeded to dismember her poor puppet. At least I got a picture before she took him all apart.

Moo!

Lunch with Daddy

A couple of weeks ago Anabelle and I took a drive down town to have lunch with Daddy. After some yummy Chinese food we decided to visit the park right behind John's work.

After lots of fun running around and playing it was time to get into the car and drive home. Anabelle was pretty tired so she quickly fell into her routine of thumb sucking and hair twirling. She wound her finger around her hair and then proceeded to fall asleep. I have never seen her get her finger so tightly around her hair that it got stuck, and I guess she was just so tired she didn't care and fell asleep anyway. Of course I thought this was hilarious and had to snap some pictures.

Well my giggling faded when she woke up yelling, "help you, help you! Finger out, finger out!" We had to pull over and unwind her finger from her hair. Now when she twirls her hair in the car I remind her not to do it so tightly :)

Pumpkin picking

I have been slacking on my blogging lately...

Not too much to report around here. We have all managed to catch a cold, so we are taking it easy this weekend with lots of naps and couch time. We did manage a little outing this morning, just to get some fresh air. Since the weather was nice we decided to head over to the pumpkin farm to pick out some pumpkins.

Pumpkins farms are a serious business here in the Midwest! There are quite a few, and they aren't what I envisioned a pumpkin farm would be like. I would like to go out to a field where you walk through rows of pumpkins, picking your favorite one and paying less than $10 for it. They could even have a stand where you can buy yummy Fall treats -I'm ok with that too.

Most of the "farms" that I find around here charge on average $8 admission/person to walk in the door. Once in, there are tons of carnival rides, food stands, petting zoos, games, corn mazes, wagon rides, and you've yet to even buy your pumpkin. By the time you leave you've spent at least $50.

I don't mind so much that these places exist, I just wish that there was some variety and that I could find something more like what I originally envisioned a pumpkin farm would be like. I am sure when Anabelle is a little older she'll really enjoy spending hours at the pumpkin farm partaking in all of the activities, and I am sure we'll have fun too. But there also needs to be something for people with smaller children, children with special needs, or people who don't want to spend a ton of money. A place where you can experience a little bit of Fall, take some cute pictures, and not be completely over stimulated. At this age any outing could take a turn for the worse quickly, so it seems crazy to spend $8/person and then have to leave in 20 minutes because of any number of toddler reasons.

Wanting more of an experience than just buying our pumpkin at Wal-mart, I remembered where I used to take my students when I taught. We would go to Sonny Acres in West Chicago. It is a huge place complete with all of the activities found at other pumpkin farms. However they don't charge admission and they use a ticket system for their rides. So it was a good compromise. Maybe this isn't cost effective for the kid who wants to ride every ride 10 times, but for a little 2 yr old who is happy to just ride the choo-choo once, walk around and look at all the decorations, choose a pumpkin, and then head home it was just the right price. We got 2 large pumpkins, a ride, and Fall ambiance for $22 dollars.