Halloween 2011 (Lots of pictures!)

Halloween this year consisted of Trunk-or-Treat at our church on Sunday evening, and then trick-or-treating in our neighborhood on Monday evening. Andrea also went trick-or-treating with her class at the senior center next to her school last week (although they didn’t wear costumes, just orange/black with a little makeup), and she had her friend’s Halloween-themed birthday party on Saturday. So I feel Halloween has been going on for at least a week. It was so fun, but I’m exhausted and glad to be done with pumpkins, costumes, and candy. (Although we’ll be eating all this candy for a while now…)

First, a recap of trunk-or-treat. We decorated my Mazda5 like a princess castle, and it was a big hit. Andrea loved it, and so did the other kids. I hung sheets from the side to make the walls, and cut and spray-painted some cardboard for the top. Then we laid out a bunch of Andrea’s dress-up stuff on the inside, as if a princess lived there. It was like a Disney princess explosion in there. LOL!

Her best friend from church showed up dressed as Cinderella too, and the two were inseparable all night.
Her best friend at church also went as Cinderella. They were inseparable!

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Birthday Party Fun

Yesterday morning was supposed to be Andrea’s last day of soccer, but the game was rescheduled for next week due to some rain we got Friday night. At first, Andrea was pretty disappointed, but she quickly forgot about soccer when we reminded her that she was going to her friend Ryan’s 4th birthday party. She started talking non-stop about Ryan after that. It was a Halloween themed party and the invitation said to wear a costume and be ready for pumpkin painting. I didn’t want her wearing her good Cinderella dress, because I was afraid it might get paint on it, but I realized we had a second (machine washable) Cinderella dress that she could wear. It was a good trial run for her hair and I got to try out the Cinderella headband I made for her. Her hair looked good, but I found out I really needed to pull out the hairspray to get the updo right for our church’s trunk-or-treat on Sunday night.

When we got to the party, we thought it was a little weird that there were no cars out front. It turned out that parents weren’t staying at the party – a party for 3 and 4 year olds! I was pretty freaked out, but the birthday boy’s parents and his aunt and uncle were all there and in costume, and we were the only other adults standing around. I wasn’t worried about Andrea, but I felt really strange just dropping her off for someone else to deal with for a couple of hours. The mom has a few kids, and I see her at pick-up and drop-off all the time, but I don’t actually *know* her. Andrea told us to leave, so we ran an errand, got some lunch, and wondered what else were supposed to do with our unexpected free time. When we picked Andrea up later, she was having a blast. She said they painted pumpkins, opened presents, and played in Ryan’s playroom. And apparently, they served pizza for lunch, but the mom told me that Andrea said she didn’t like pizza, so they made her PB&J instead. (She will eat pizza, but it’s definitely not one of her favorites. I usually have to encourage her to eat it.) At least she knows how to speak up for herself!

I just snapped one quick photo on the way in, but it’s not great because the lighting was all wrong. I knew at the time it didn’t turn out, but I didn’t think it mattered, since I’d take more at the party, but obviously, that didn’t happen.
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After the party, Andrea talked even more about Ryan, and sounded like a little girl in love. It was hilarious. She told us that she can go to Ryan’s house any time she wants. And then she told us that next year for Ryan’s party she wants to be a hula girl. I thought she was going to give Paul a heart attack! LOL. She was so worn out after the party that she told us she was tired and asked us to take her “straight home.” We did, and she went down for a nap almost the moment we got home.

And just a cute funny from later in the afternoon… Paul was cleaning out his wallet and pulled out his Delta AMEX credit card (sample image). Andrea immediately pointed to it and said, “That’s for travelling!” (Well, it sounds like “trabbeling when she says it.) We were a little shocked, and asked her how she knew that, so she pointed to the (triangular) Delta logo on the card, and said, “Because that arrow!” Then we asked where she saw that, because we really weren’t sure why she knew the Delta logo at all, and she said, “At the airport!” Of course she did. She hasn’t been in an airport since we flew to Missouri in April. We did fly Delta then (we usually do), but still… she remembers a logo from 6 months ago? Crazy.

Tonight we had a blast at our church’s Trunk-or-Treat. I’ll post more about that tomorrow after I have a chance to go through all the pictures. 🙂

Pumpkin Painting!

Andrea has been really excited about Halloween this year, and everything about it. We’ve done a ton of Halloween themed crafts, several of which I’ve already posted. And a couple of weekends ago, we went to a Pumpkin Patch with her Daddy and Opa. But we only bought a few miniature pumpkins at the pumpkin patch we went to first, because our church does a big pumpkin sale fundraiser every year, and we knew we wanted to buy our pumpkins from there. So last weekend, we went up to the church and picked out some pumpkins. Andrea wanted to get every small pumpkins she laid her eyes on, but we kept her to 6 or so (at ~$1 / pumpkin, I didn’t mind buying several). But what to do with all these little pumpkins? Andrea had been begging all week to paint them, so finally the other day, I put a smock on her, got out the tempera paints, and let her go to town. The results were pretty cute.

I’ve also been working on finalizing our costumes for Halloween. Andrea is going as Cinderella. She already has the dress and I got her some “glass slippers” from the Disney Store, but she wants a blue headband like Cinderella wears in the movie, and I’m working on how I’m going to put her hair in an up-do like Cinderella’s. I’m going as the Fairy Godmother, and bought a light blue choir robe to wear, and then even used the sewing machine (gasp!) to make a hood and big pink bow for my outfit. Pictures of that will come later. But suffice it to say, Andrea is ridiculously excited about it. Her preschool already went trick-or-treating at the senior center across from their school this week, and she brought home a TON of candy from there. For that, they just used eyeliner or something similar to draw a cat nose and whiskers on her face. She looked adorable when I picked her up. 🙂 Anyway, on to the pumpkin pictures…

Posing with the pumpkins
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Lovely day for the park

The weather this week has been wonderful. Cool and crisp in the morning and sunny and warm in the afternoon. On Tuesday, I picked Andrea up after school and took her straight to a nearby playground to enjoy the lovely fall day. And of course I brought my camera with me to take pictures. 🙂 She loved climbing up everything and going down the slides. And she was even really brave about crossing the little suspension bridge at the top. She usually doesn’t like the bridges that move at all when you walk on them. She played for over an hour, before I finally figured we should head home for an afternoon snack. Before we left, we picked some beautiful fall leaves from a nearby tree. We’ll be using them in some sort of craft later this week. Of course, I wasn’t thinking and they are oak leaves. Hopefully dried leaves won’t bother Andrea’s allergies – oak is the thing she was found to be most allergic to when we recently did allergy testing, but I think that’s mostly the pollen, not the dried leaves. I hope.

Here’s my favorite. I’m definitely framing this one. 🙂
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Future Soccer Star!

Andrea started a 7-week soccer program for 3 year olds through the YMCA in September. She loves running around at home and kicking the soccer ball, but the second we got to soccer, she would turn into a clingy, whiny little mess. She would do okay at the practice drills at the beginning, but then mostly refused to play the game. She did a little better a week ago – Paul said she tried to get the ball a few times, but then complained that other kids were in the way. So we practiced playing “keep away” with the soccer ball during the week, to help her understand that part of the game is that more than one person is trying to get the same ball. That seemed to help and this past weekend, it finally clicked. She spent the entire game running around either kicking the ball or chasing after whoever was kicking the ball. It was great! She was beaming and kept announcing how many goals she made. And for once, I wasn’t hoarse after the game from pleading with her to run and kick the ball. 🙂

I posted this video on Facebook of one of her goals.

And here are some pictures from practice and the game…

 

 

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Visit from Opa

It was a busy weekend so I fell behind in my updates a little, but I have a lot of pictures to post so here goes! As I mentioned in a previous post, Paul’s dad was here last week. We went to the Pumpkin Patch when he first arrived, then he went to work with Paul during the week so we didn’t get to do much. Then Friday, when Andrea was off school, we met Paul & Opa for lunch and then took Opa with us to the Imagine It! Children’s Museum of Atlanta. We have a membership there because Andrea loves it so much, and I knew Andrea would love showing off all the cool exhibits and things to her Opa. I didn’t realize Opa would have as much fun as Andrea though. 🙂 I got some great pictures of Andrea with her Daddy and her Opa on Thursday night before we took Opa out for dinner, and a lot more on Friday on our trip to the Children’s Museum. We had a great week, and hated to say goodbye to Opa so soon, but at least we’ll be seeing Opa, Oma, and the rest of our families soon over the holidays.

Andrea and Daddy:
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Andrea and Opa:
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