Holidays

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Happy Halloween!

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Just keep trick or treating… just keep trick or treating…

Is there anything better than a group costume? As you might have noticed from F’s birthday, she’s a bit obsessed with fishies and the Finding Nemo/Dory movies. So it didn’t take much to convince the rest of the family that we should dress up as characters from the movies.

There was no question that F gets Dory, the blue fish. I love my fuzzy nemo costume and am going to need to find a way to make this my costume every year. If you haven’t seen Finding Dory, you might not know E’s character Hank. Tom is Bruce the shark, and Gideon is either Squirt or Crush (one of the turtles).

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Fun on the 4th

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Our town puts on a carnival every 4th of July called fun on the 4th, although this year oddly enough it happened the last week of June. Besides being confusing, it meant we missed it while we were on vacation. So we went looking for our own fun during our long weekend. E told me that they didn’t mind, though, because vacation was way better.

We hung out with friends on the actual 4th and went to a parade in search of candy. The candy was a little stingy this year, but enough to keep the kids happy. What did not keep the kids happy were all the guns they shoot off in the parade - some right in front of us. Are those really necessary? I could definitely do without them.

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Last Fall Shoutout

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Time to dump a bunch of pictures and maybe some memories tied to them. I wasn’t kidding when I said the fall was non stop events, to the point I forgot we even did some of these things until I saw the pictures.

We checked out a new local farm for pumpkins, hay rides, and to E’s excitement - a corn maze! We also later went to our local farm stand to do their corn maze, which is much more my speed - and F’s too. They open at 7am, so we like to go early in the morning and let the kids run through the maze for an hour until they’re tired.

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Thanksgiving 2023

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The fall holiday season is moving right along.

As much as I’d love to hit pause, it’s not going to happen, so let’s just jump right in.

As always, I tried to make Thanksgiving as low key as possible. I had bought some pies and a pumpkin roll from a fund raiser at the elementary school, and figured that would be good enough for Thanksgiving, and then was told that we NEEDED a pumpkin pie. Which is fine, I love pumpkin pies too, so the kids made one on the Wednesday they were out of school. Turns out F is really into baking and loved the whole process. And everyone loved the pie.

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Halloween 2023

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It’s currently after Thanksgiving and I still haven’t loaded Halloween pictures on my computer yet, which shows you how behind on everything I am. I have 7 Christmas trees up in my house, at least, so some priorities are in tact.

Like the rest of the year has been, October was super rainy. We missed out on a couple Halloween events because it was raining, which was too bad. We still managed to have fun and dress in costumes a few times, and I’m not sure the kids misses anything since we added a few new events.

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Celebrating the 4th of July

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The 4th of July has never been my holiday, even before our country started attacking my rights so bad that I’m embarrassed to be a citizen, but it means that I don’t have a lot of experience celebrating it. Sure when I was in Boston I went to the fireworks a few time, mostly because it was easy - all you had to do was be outside at a certain time. But I’ve never done the parades and parties and whatever else you do on the 4th.

The first mistake I made was not realizing I should have picked out red, white and blue clothing for everyone. Because apparently that’s thing number one you do when celebrating this holiday. We definitely own a lot of things that could have passed, and I specifically know that G has patriotic PJs. Which would have helped since G pretty much only wears PJs when he can, and also means I should have thought about what PJs he got into the night of the 3rd. But I didn’t, which means he ended up wearing Halloween PJs all day on the 4th haha. It totally doesn’t matter and actually made me laugh all day.

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Easter

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Sometimes I wonder what our Easter will look like ten years from now. What things will have stuck as traditions, and what things will look different? It equal parts fun and frustrating trying to decide how we celebrate our holidays each year. Is there special food that we eat? Places we visit?

This year we celebrated at home with the five of us. The kids had their matching PJs, eggs were hidden, and everyone ate a lot of candy. We did color coded eggs again, which worked pretty well for us. F was able to find all of her eggs, and she had so much fun putting them in her basket and carrying them around. E’s were the hardest to find, and took him the longest to find all of his eggs.

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Valentine's Day

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When the end of January came around, I went looking for the bin of Valentine’s decorations. I was surprised to realize we only had 3 wooden hearts, a table cloth, and two things that hung from the ceiling. I was sure we’d decorated in past years, but couldn’t figure out why we didn’t have more. Which is why I love this blog, because it reminded me that last year we decorated with homemade Elmo and Abby Cadabby decorations, because that was what the kids wanted. And the year before I think we taped paper hearts to the wall.

So this year I was determined to find some more permanent decorations. The kids made it clear they were not happy with what we had, and honestly neither was I. There’s nothing like a nice distraction when life feels too heavy. So throw ourselves into Valentine’s day we did. We ended up with banners and hearts on the walls and a fully decorated house.