I know, I know... Way too early!

Okay, first of all let me explain the situation. We always put up our Christmas tree either the Friday after or the Sunday before Thanksgiving (depending on the date of Thanksgiving). The kids have been asking and asking to do the tree since Halloween. It has been cloudy and chilly and it just put us all in the holiday mood. We are going to my Mom and Dad's for the whole week of Thanksgiving. We will be coming back Sunday night. I just knew that I didn't want the mess of the trip mixing with the mess of putting up our decorations. I also knew that this was going to be a busy week and weekend with getting ready for the trip and shopping and visiting teaching...... So..... Last Sunday..... we put up our tree. What can I say, we are crazy. Even David and I were in the mood (me a little more than him I think - but he wouldn't have gone along with the idea if he wasn't in the mood :).
I love the Christmas season and I feel like it is too short as it is. So here ya go. Enjoy my not so great pictures of our preparation. I hope it gets you in the mood for your upcoming preparations too :).

Last year the girls noticed that I would move ornaments around after they were all done decorating. They had asked me what I was doing and I explained how I like the ornaments to look and how to fill in the spaces in the tree. They helped me some last year. This year was awesome. I didn't even have to touch the tree. Emma and Joelle fixed all the weird spots by themselves. They were pretty sneaky about it so that the younger ones didn't even notice the girls were moving the ornaments they had hung. They made the tree very pretty. It was great to see them in action. I was quite proud :).

I have always wanted a fireplace just to hang stockings above it. I was sad because this fireplace didn't have a mantel. Joelle came up with this idea and I loved it! I love living with smart people. It makes life so much easier :).

Gotta love Michaels

I have said it before and I'll say it again, I love cheap easy crafts from Micheal's. I know that to anyone with any actual craft ability these are not real crafts, but for my family they are as good as it gets. Joelle and Emma did this little Thanksgiving scene. They had a blast with it.
Ben has been bugging us to make a volcano for months (since the last one we made when we first moved here - when will this fascination with volcanoes end? :). I picked this up on clearance at Michael's for 5 bucks. He loved it. I couldn't figure the thing out. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out with him and then gave up and told him to wait for Dad. David is great. It just took some careful precision with a hot glue gun (instead of the glue it came with that I was trying to use) and it turned out great. Ben loved it. He did all the trees and stones and most of the lava. Thank you David for being such a great, patient Dad. What would I do without you :)!?

Halloween is so much fun!

Last Saturday night we had our ward trunk or treat. Luckily the rain held off until the last few minutes of the party. David loves to go all out with our trunk. We had all 3 of our carved pumpkins all lit up, 2 grave stones (one behind me that you cant see), a few skulls (which I hate), a big black light (also behind me :), a fog machine (in the bowl where Ben is standing), and a few other things I forgot I am sure. The fog machine is always the biggest hit. We actually won last year mostly because of that. This year someone had brought a huge decorated trailer (how do you compete with that :). David and I were pirates as usual - I am more like a gypsy I think (we did figure out that we have been pirates for at least our last 4 ward parties - luckily we were in different wards for some of them :). We had our candy in our big treasure chest on the ground with a big skull in the middle of it. We told the kids they could take 2 candies if they were brave enough to reach in and get it themselves. I think David is a little to morbid for ward parties, but the older kids loved it :)!
Don't you love trunk or treats. A million people all walking around in circles in a parking lot. I always wonder what it looks like when you are driving by. Do people wonder what we are doing? I think it would be funny to find out.

This is our pumpkin patch on Halloween night. We got out our lights hoping it would draw kids down our street. Our neighbors told us that we used to get a lot of trick or treators, but the last few years they have only gotten 1 or 2. So we put out strobe lights and orange lights and black lights hoping to draw them in. We ended up getting about 15 kids total, so that was better than they have been having.

We kept hearing from all our neighbors that they were so excited because they knew they would get at least 5 kids trick or treating this year. We hadn't decided yet how we felt about trick or treating on Sunday. Even the kids weren't sure how they felt about it. We decided we would trick or treat to just our little cul de sac. We were so glad we did. Most the people on our block have lived in their houses for at least 25 years (that gives you an idea of the sweet people we live around). The third house down from us is a couple from South Africa. They have lived in their house for 35 years. They invited our kids in for a minute. She gave them each a little baggie with their name on it. Each bag had four little candy bars and a dollar in it. The kids thought this was awesome. It took us a while to leave because Katie had put here blanket somewhere and 2 other kids lost their little flashlights (and we had only gone in about 10 feet :). Then a few more doors down was another couple that we have seen, but not actually met yet. When we walked up the woman asked if we were the kids from across the street? My kids said yes, and she said to wait a minute because her husband had gotten something special for just our kids. They gave them these big tin M&M's with little bags of M&M's in them. It was such a neat thing to see all these people showing so much love to our kids. It made me so happy.

While we were out in the cul de sac, my girls little friend Andrea came around the corner to trick or treat with her mom. We are back yard neighbors. She is an only child, and we absolutely adore her. She is so sweet and has been such a good friend to our kids. Andrea's mom was saying how sad Andrea was because her best friend that she would trick or treat with every year had moved and she had no one to trick or treat with. So we decided we would go with them for a street or two. We had a very good time with them. We got to talk to her mom and found out a lot about them. It was a very good night getting to be with all these new wonderful people. We love our neighborhood.

When we came home we were freezing so David started us a fire and we had hot chocolate. Then we watched "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving." It was the perfect ending to the night.

Katie ended up dumping everyone's candy into our big treasure chest (which didn't make some of the kids very happy). The trunk did have a towel in the bottom of it, so it wasn't completely full :). It was a good haul though. All in all we had a great Halloween. We missed our family and friends but enjoyed getting to know some new friends.