Halloween

It seemed like this October had more Halloween activies than we ever have before! It started with an afternoon of Elliot coating our downstairs wtih a layer of halloween art that he taped up while blasting the "wee sing for halloween" album. Next up was a witches brew activity I copied off Instagram. 

Food coloring + body wash + water + frother = a messy good time

Isaac was one with the brew

No, the concrete did not stain, but the kids hands were pretty blue for a while. No regrets. 

 Next up- Marana pumpkin patch! Elliot was super excited to go in a real corn maze. We went in only the easy one which took about 20 minutes. There is a huge one that supposedly takes 1-2 hours to complete. We managed to talk him out of that one this year so we could go on the rides and watch the pig races.

The corn flyer! We also rode the cornado and the super slide, but it was too dark to get pictures of those. 

Riding the train around the corn fields. Elliot had run off with his cousins while we took our littles on the winnie the pooh ride. Isaac spent the train ride trying to throw his sandals overboard. 

Why yes, this indoor digger contraption did make you sneeze if you walked within 100 feet of it. 

Annie was AWFUL at driving around these carts. It was hilarious. She was constantly looking the other way, crashing into the hay, and causing a traffic jam as the cars piled up behind her. The busiest employee at the farm had the job of hauling apart the traffic jam cars. 

Next up was the Barnett's pumpkin painting party! Annie painted hers, but Elliot refrained insisting we had to carve it. He stuck to decorating cupcakes instead. 

True to form, he insisted that we at least start to carve it before church the next morning. We tried scraping the insides of the pumpkin with a hand mixer and it did a pretty good job of losening up the gunk. 

The Town of Sahurita trunk or treat. We waited in line forever to get small bags of candy. The real treasure of the night was that each kid got a helium balloon. No one expected Isaac to react as strongly as he did. He gave a squeal of pure delight when we tied it to the stroller and played with it for days until the helium ran out. 

All decked out for the ward trunk or treat! Elliot was Nemo for the 4th year in a row, Annie was a unicorn (thanks to my parents for giving her the awesome present for her birthday!), Isaac was a dragon, and I was a kid's art project- although a couple people asked if I was Angelina Jolie's colored wedding dress.

The classic "whack-a-deacon" activity. They pop up like moles, and kids get to bop them on the head with pool noodles. 

Aaron's work mailed us ingredients to make monster popcorn and dirt and worms. We made them over zoom with some other kids from the company. Elliot actually chimed in to tell his bat jokes. It was a big hit!

Cielo modeling the Frankenstien head I made for the trunk or treat. Kids stick their hands up the nose to get a treat. 

Decorating cookies halloween day

Halloween itself was on a Sunday this year. I was very torn about how to balance keeping the sabbath day holy with wanting to be a good neighbor. In the end, we decided that we wouldn't go trick or treating on Sunday but we would pass out candy. This felt fine to me since we had already done two trunk or treats and pretty much a month full of halloween activities. The kids were a little bummed, but I think they understood the lesson we were trying to teach. Elliot did really enjoy passing out the candy. He dutifully ran the Frankenstein nose until we ran out of candy.