Catch up - Halloween part 2

I know I have been slacking on the blog but it is time for me to get caught up. I print my blog out every other year as our family journal and this is the year it needs to be printed so I have to catch up on all that has been going on in our lives before I print it out.

We had a fun Halloween, our first Halloween in our new home. Luckily, we moved in just days before Halloween so we were able to go trick or treating in our new neighborhood. We invited some of our friends from Oakland to join us. We have been trick or treating with them for a few years now and their kids are the same ages as ours. Here are a few pictures of the kids. They were monsters this year.

 Our realtor left us several pumpkins lining our walkway to our house when we moved in so we had a lot of carving to do.

 Crew loves lollipops.When we got home we found him a few minutes later in the kitchen with about 10 lollipops. He had three or four in his mouth at the same time and several unwrapped and on the kitchen floor. He is his mother's son. He has a big sweet tooth.

 Gotta love this cute kid!

Athen had a Halloween parade at school so we got to go down and join his class. It was fun to see all the little kids in their costumes. Athen and Crew didn't wear half of their costumes. They didn't want the hat on or the tail or the gloves but they still looked cute.





We spent a lot of time in November working on our house. Trying to get paint on the walls and electrical outlets and switches changed over from a beige plate to a white plate (we still aren't done with this). Who knew that that little project would take so long but when you only have a few hours a day after work to get things done it takes awhile. I will post some before and after pictures of the progress of our house soon.

We headed to Utah for Thanksgiving. I like going to Utah for Thanksgiving. The weather isn't too cold or snowy yet and I like the black Friday shopping there much better then in California. Rick's family does black Friday shopping (Rick is the one who got me into it) and my family doesn't. It is much more fun when there is a bunch of people doing it. We loaded up on on about 90% of our Christmas shopping plus some extras for our house. We bought a few towel sets and bathroom supplies for some of our bathrooms. We know have four bathrooms so we need a lot of towels. We bought a 50" flat screen TV for the family room, a blue ray DVD player with wifi, fancy toothbrushes, a projector so we can have family movie nights in our backyard this summer and a million other things. In fact we ended up having to borrow Rick's dad's trailer to tow home all of our new things along with some furniture and all of Rick's boxes of stuff from growing up. It was a lot of stuff we brought home with us, good thing we have room for it all now.

I asked Athen what he wanted to do for his birthday this year and he said he wanted a party. I asked him what kind of party he wanted, a monster party a dinosaur party etc. and he said "A kid party". I asked him what he meant by a kid party and he said a party with lots of kids, with all of his cousins from Utah. So that is what we did. I think he has close to 20 cousins in Utah. We had cake and ice cream, a silly string fight in the backyard and opened gifts. There were so many kids there all giving him attention and singing to him I think he was a little overwhelmed, but he loved it at the same time.




Aunt Caitlyn and Uncle David brought silly string to the party and surprised Athen in the backyard with a silly string fight. He loved it.




Athen loves cooking and baking with me. Together we made some monster cupcakes for his school class on his birthday. Everyone loved them. I can't believe my little boy is 4 years old.