Halloween and More!

Halloween quickly crept up on us!  Before that though we enjoyed lots of lovely fall days. 

These are out of order, but the kids finished soccer.  They enjoyed going and learned some soccer skills. Next time I'll get them soccer cleats instead of baseball cleats.  Oops!








The last day of soccer they had an awards ceremony and lunch.






To prep for Halloween Lee and I did a trip to Costco to buy candy.  We decided to hand out full-sized candy this year. Trying to keep the dentists in business! Our town does a downtown trick-or-treating where Lee hands out candy at his business, so we never hand out candy at home. We will get an occasional trick-or-treater and then we'll just raid our kids' candy to hand out.




Lee hired the kids to put a little ad for his business on each piece of candy.


They had fun working for Lee.


The kids didn't get it all done in one night so we told the kids that whoever kept working putting the little ads on the candy would continue to get paid.  Shanna was really gun-ho and finished up almost all of the candy.


Every year we do sugar cookies at Halloween.  Shanna loves being in the kitchen and helping out.










Shanna and Haley also decorated cookies and brought them to their class.  Their classmates were very excited about the cookies!




With redoing the bedrooms upstairs we did some organizing here and there.  One spot was Elden's drawer.  It's super huge and was pretty much always messy.  I really enjoyed the book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up".  Marie Kondo, the author, has a method for folding clothes and what not call the KonMari method. Lee and I will help Elden a little extra when putting away his clothes, but his is keeping it nice and it still looks pretty great even today!


Another place we cleaned out was a knee-wall attic space.  When we moved back into the bedrooms upstairs after the floors were re-finished, I wanted everything cleaned and organized, including the attic spaces.  We have three different attic areas.  In one of them there was a ton of junk.  Like old green and pink tile from the previous owner.  Lee said he was keeping the stuff in there for the next owner, ha ha.  Sorry Lee! Thanks for bringing it to the curb.  And thanks to our awesome trash-pick-up-crew.  They took all of it.  See more pictures below. 


All of this stuff too....


And these....  Between people taking it and the garbage guys picking it up, it was all gone the next day!


For the pack meeting in October I thought it would be fun to do one on snakes.  Haley's forth grade reading teacher (Ben Markel) has lots of snakes and is quite the expert with them.  I asked him if he would bring a couple snakes and talk to the boys about snakes, along with snake safety.  In general the boys loved it (one or two didn't like the snakes, which never left Ben's hands) and Ben did a great job with the boys. 




Testing out the Halloween accessories.


Elden had another field trip to Shenandoah National Park. 




Cal and Clark went paint-balling one afternoon. I'm not sure how I feel about paint-balling as they are shooting at other people.  But they do like it.






That same afternoon we went to the tri-unit Fall Festival.  It was so fun!  If I get around to it, I'll get my pictures off the camera from that night.

Lee continued to enjoy bike rides this fall.


I went in for a little bit for Elden's school Halloween party.


One of the mom's made these cute spiders out of suckers!


The night of Halloween Lee handed out candy again (just over 600 pieces) and wore his creepy contacts again.  I went trick-or-treating around town with my friend Katherine, my kids and some of her kids. It was a lot of fun.


We put all of the candy that Lee handed out in a huge trash bag.  It was SO heavy!  I could barely lift it by myself.


Before trick-or-treating.






Lee finished handing his candy out in about an hour, then met up with us.  There is a cool garden store here that has firepits and marshmallows for roasting every year.  They hand out candy too.  On the way home from school that day Cal accidentally hit a ceramic scarecrow hand that was sticking out over the sidewalk.  It belonged to the garden place.  Lee talked to the owner that night and thankfully the owner said not to worry about it.  Cal would have had very little money left in his savings otherwise!


They "carve" out a huge pumpkin every year too that they grow.  This one was over 600 pounds if I remember correctly.


After we came back to my house where Katherine and I visited over soup, and the kids indulged on candy.  We also watched an edited version of the old Ghostbuster's movie. 


We had a great Halloween with lots of candy!  Lee and I enjoyed that too.  April, Katherine's daughter, brought little treat bags for everyone including the adults which was thoughtful and fun.