Halloween 2013

(First of all, let me apologize for missing Monday’s and Wednesday’s posts.  I thought I had posts scheduled to go up, but evidently I didn’t.  Oops.  Everything is fine here and I haven’t had any babies or anything.)

Halloween!  I looooooooove Halloween.  It’s smack in the middle of my favorite season, it’s the unofficial start of the holidays, and I just love the day.  My birthday is in mid-October, so when I was a kid I often had Halloween-themed birthday parties.  Hubby even calls me “Jaclyn Lantern” – one of my favorite nicknames.  This year, I was both excited for and dreading Halloween at the same time.  Dreading because my sister-in-law Emma and I are in the midst of a Whole30 – my second and her third – so neither of us would be able to partake in the sugary parts of the holiday.  (That candy bowl did call to me fairly loudly last night, but I decided I was just hungry and shut it up with a chicken curry with carrots and kale.  It was a lot easier to resist the candy than it was to avoid the cider donuts at the pumpkin patch, though.  That was kind of painful.)

But Whole30 aside, I was really very excited for this Halloween because it would be the first time that Peanut could participate.  Last year she was teeny tiny and had only been home from the NICU for twenty days, so we were still trying to adjust to the lack of sleep and figure out life with a newborn.  Add to that, Superstorm Sandy swept through and while we didn’t really get hit in DC, we had enough rain that it made getting out to the store to buy a costume almost impossible.  By the time I made it out of the house, most of the newborn sized costumes were gone.  I ended up finding a tutu at Target and paired it with a onesie we already had to make a slapdash ballerina costume.

This year, we were determined to do it up right… or at least half-heartedly.  Peanut is still too little for trick-or-treating, but we procured plenty of candy for our trick-or-treaters (a bust; we only got one kid – hubby’s office is going to be sugar-high for a looooooong time) and we got Peanut a real costume to wear for her first visit to the pumpkin patch.  This year, she was a…

Kitty cat!

(Carters had two costumes in her size: a kitty cat and a ladybug.  The were both darling and I couldn’t choose, so we let Daddy decide, and he picked the kitty.  I think he made the right decision!)

Last weekend, we took our little kitty to the pumpkin patch to pick out our pumpkins – something else we didn’t bother with last year.  We picked a small farm instead of the gigantic pumpkin colossus that most families here visit, because we thought it would be less overwhelming for Peanut, and I think we made the right call, because the pumpkin farm was plenty stimulating.  There were hayrides and pony rides, which we skipped – maybe next year – a gigantic contraption for bobbing for apples, two barns full of animals to greet, and plenty of pumpkins and apples for the choosing.

We immediately headed for the barns.  Peanut loved visiting with the animals at Mount Vernon, so we thought she’d get a big kick out of these.  Well, I think we either surprised her or got too close, because she burst into tears at the very first stall (donkeys).  I whisked her outside, calmed her down, and we went back in when she was ready.  After the initial cloudburst, she was all smiles as she met horses, cows, sheep, goats, a gigantic bunny rabbit, a dog and a cat.  The cat was the biggest hit of the day.

Next we meandered over by the apple stalls and checked out the fresh produce on offer (and tortured ourselves with the smells of cider donuts).

Then we headed into the pumpkin patch for the main event: choosing our family pumpkins!

On Halloween itself, Peanut and I enjoyed a snuggly day at home filled with plenty of reading (she’s very into the Karen Katz lift-the-flaps books, so we read Where Is Baby’s Pumpkin? about seventy-five times), giggles and treats.

Giggles:

Treats:

(My absolute favorite Halloween treat: roasted pumpkin seeds!  Why yes, I do look forward to these all. year. long.)

Hope your Halloween was as much fun as our multi-day extravaganza!  (And I hope you got more than one trick-or-treater.  Weak.)