halloween!

Halloween this year was quite different from Lilly's first Halloween last year. (I think that's the theme of this year...how much different each holiday/experience was from last year...it's just so amazing how much kids change and grow in just one year!  Especially the first year.)

First off, I thought I'd share our pumpkin carving adventures.  The pumpkin we got at the Louisburg patch became Lilly's, and I got 2 others at Wal Mart for Matt and I to carve.  Wal Mart's prices are much more my style. :)  I also got a foam sticker kit for Lilly (from Target I think?) to decorate her pumpkin.  I knew she was just a little young for carving, and thought about doing paint, but saw this and thought it was perfect.  Stickers are her JAM right now.

I was so impressed with her skills.  I gave her slight direction on the placement of her stickers, just a general idea of where eyes, nose, mouth, etc should go, but she really did the work all herself.  Which made the end result SO CUTE!

And as you can see, she was quite proud of it!

She also "helped" with the carving efforts once we moved on to the big pumpkins.  And by "helped" I mean she played in the guts and scooped them from one bucket to another. :)  She loved every second of it.

Here is the final result of all 3 pumpkins - Matt's on top, mine in the middle, and Lilly's on the bottom.

And the lit up versions of the carved ones:

Now onto the fun part - Halloween costumes!  I'll start with the grown up costumes - yes, we dressed up.  We did a group costume with our friends Ash & Zach, and I think it came out pretty darn cute if I may say so myself.

We're going on a cruise together in February, and there is a costume theme night.  We thought we'd represent good ol' KS with our Wizard of Oz theme.  We have a little perfecting to do on our costumes before wearing them again, but I'm just excited we're going to get 2 uses out of them!

Now on to the one you really want to see...

(I know, not her Halloween costume, but still a cute picture.  I love that she insisted her doll and teddy bear - Amy & Teddy - sit with her for the picture)

Now, let me tell you a little story about Lilly's actual Halloween costume.  

One day we were casually strolling through Target, and saw this costume hanging on the rack:

Lilly spotted it herself, and loved it.  I asked her if she wanted to wear it for Halloween, and she excitedly said YES! She carried it around the store, and seemed to really like it.  I was so excited...this was several weeks before Halloween, so I thought I was mom of the year and had her costume squared away well in advance of the actual holiday.  Plus, it was only 20 bucks! It felt like a win win.  Until we got home and I asked her if she wanted to try it on.  I got a big fat NO.  So I let it go, and tried again another day.  NO again.  I thought maybe she was just unsure of it, so I tried putting it on her, not exactly forcefully but against a bit of resistance - BAD idea.  She screamed bloody murder and ran around the house trying to get it off.  Since this was still a few weeks before Halloween, I thought maybe giving it a rest for a while and revisiting the idea later would work - you know, maybe she'd forget about the previous traumatization the costume caused her...  Yeah, wrong again.  She got to the point where the word costume being said resulted in "No! No! No!" coming out of her mouth.  Every time.  

So I decided to cut my losses and returned the dang thing while I still could.  I debated on what to do for a plan B, and ended up going the DIY route, making her costume myself.  The plan was to make it out of just a regular zip up jacket, so that it wasn't technically a costume...no, just a jacket!  I found the idea on Pinterest (shocker) and made the whole thing with a few pieces of felt, some leftover fabric, and a hot glue gun.  It was rather tedious, but came out really cute.  I didn't even show it to her until about 5 minutes before I was going to put it on, and I just told her we were going outside so she needed to wear her jacket.  SUCCESS!  She put it on, along with the owl hat I found (I planned on making this out of felt too but there was a perfect hat at wal mart for $5 so obviously I went that route instead!), and didn't even flinch.  I'm actually not sure that we ever showed her herself in the mirror that night, but she eventually did see in pictures.  We had a few friends and family over for pizza and to go trick-or-treating, and everyone told her what a cute owl she was - which I won't lie made me a little nervous at first (I thought for sure she'd have flashbacks and start freaking out), but she just went with it and was happy as a clam all night!  So, I guess the moral of the story is you never know what crazy thing is going to freak your kid out.  But just roll with it and hope for the best - it worked for us...this time. :)

Here's my cute little owl showing off her costume (I mean, jacket...)

And yes, I took a million pictures.  I felt the need to document this costume, given the HOURS it took me to make. Plus, at this point I still wasn't 100% confident that she'd actually wear it all night, so I wanted to get pictures while I could. :)

And here she is with her cousin Lexi (who was the Snow Queen from Narnia) - if you can't tell, she totally looks up to this girl.  Melts my heart!!

I really didn't expect her to get into the trick-or-treating all that much. I figured she was still a little too young (not to mention she doesn't regularly eat candy, so I figured she may not even get the appeal).  But once again, I was so wrong!  She absolutely LOVED every second of trick-or-treating, and was literally running through the streets of our neighborhood with Lexi for hours.  It was so stinking cute! 

See what I mean?  I can't get over the cuteness.  

She came home with a pretty good haul of candy (most of which Daddy ate...) and passed out pretty quickly after we got back and everyone left.  We did give her some M&Ms that night, and of course she gobbled them right up. 

But overall, it was a really fun Halloween.  And much more so than I expected!  I knew Lilly would be more into it than last year (obviously.  last year she slept through trick-or-treating...), but I didn't expect her to be SO into it.  And I loved watching it!  Hopefully next year we can go without the costume fiasco, but I'm just happy it all worked out in the end.  And I must say, I do like my homemade owl costume better than Target's version anyway.  So there.