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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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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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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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“Pretty smart”

Andrea is always surprising us with the things she tells us. One day last week, she pointed to some microwave dishes on top of a building (like these). To keep things (relatively) simple, I told her they were like satellite dishes, which she had asked about before once or twice. She replied, “I think they get answers from the sky.” Not a bad explanation! I was impressed. I think I told her something similar once, a while back when she saw one and insisted I explain to her what it was. But I was pretty shocked when she said it out of the blue. When I asked her how she knew that, she said in a sly tone, “‘Cause I’m pretty smart.” LOL!

Then yesterday, I bought some stamps yesterday at the grocery store with Andrea, and she immediately wanted to know if she could help me stick them on the mail. As I was trying to respond, she caught a glimpse of them and interrupted me to inform me, “They are America ones. They’re supposed to have a door bell on them.” (These stamps had American flags instead of the Liberty Bell like the stamps I usually use.) I rarely mail anything, so I wasn’t sure how Andrea even knew what our stamps look like, but somehow she did. Again, when I asked how she knew that, she told me, “I’m pretty smart, you know!” Modest too it seems. LOL!

Then last night, she was sitting at her art table furiously sticking those little foam shape stickers on paper she tore out of a spiral notebook. She was grouping them by type (all the dinosaurs on one page, people on another, and animals on another). When we asked later what she had been doing, she told us she was studying, and showed us each page and explained, “Here’s where I was studying dinosaurs, then I studied people…” Such a studious little girl – no wonder she’s smart! 😉

And last night when I asked her if she was going to go to sleep quickly for me, she replied, “Absolutely!” Hehehe. That was a new one. She says “apparently” and “actually” all the time, but I don’t think I’d heard “absolutely” yet. She’ll often say things like, “I can’t actually see the TV,” or “There’s apparently no more glue.” It cracks me up that she talks like such a grown up some times. She also makes up smart-sounding words. The other day, she said her sunglasses were “impreffative” (impressive), and today we were talking about playing Playdoh and she told me we could make some “fashionating” (fascinating) things. Ha, ha!

And just so I don’t leave you without a picture, here’s one from yesterday, where she was modeling the hat she wants to wear to school on Monday for Hat Day (next week they’re doing letter H).
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Pumpkin Patch

Paul’s dad flew into town Saturday night, so on Sunday, we wanted to do something fun all together, and decided on a trip up to a North Georgia pumpkin patch. I heard great things about Carlton Farms in Rockmart, GA, but they didn’t open until Sunday afternoon, when I knew Andrea would already be getting tired. So I checked out a bunch of places online, and finally settled on Yahoo Farm in Jasper, GA. It is a small working pumpkin farm, where they sell pumpkins that they grow on site. They had a bunch of activities for younger kids, which was perfect for us. We all went on a hay ride for starters, then Andrea did a pony ride, jumped in a bounce house for a long time, did a cute little hay maze where she enjoyed chasing Paul around in circles, did some fossil grubbing, and rode on a pumpkin “train” with some other kids while we watched. It was very cute. They also had a corn maze, which we opted not to do, since none of us wanted to spend all afternoon lost in a corn maze. Andrea had a blast. Here are a few pictures from our day…

Posing with the pumpkins
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