Before Halloween

Halloween technically does not only come one day.  It feels like there are so many things/parties leading up to Halloween.  It's fun, but it's also a little bit exhausting.  Thankfully, I think it is mostly fun.  Julia's school party was the Friday before Halloween.  Bryan had the day off which was awesome.  He dressed up as Willy from Duck Dynasty and Julia was so excited about it.  

 They had a parade and we watched all the kids walk by.

 Lily even dressed up.  Julia loved having her there and showing her little sister off to her friends.

 Audrey also came with us.  She doesn't have school on Fridays, so her party was the next Tuesday.  She kind of struggled with figuring all of this out and was frustrated that her party didn't go EXACTLY like Julia's.  Being the second child can be rough sometimes.  Especially when both of your sisters have fall birthdays.  Tough stuff.

 They always have insane amounts of food at these parties.  There is no way humanly possible the kids could possibly eat it all.

 We brought fruit cups.

 My kitties were definitely the cutest around.

 As we contemplated pumpkin carving this year, we decided to go completely against tradition and paint the pumpkins rather than carve them.  I have never done this before so it was a definite change.  I just felt like Bryan and I did all the work and the girls didn't get to participate as much as they would have liked.  With the painting, the girls got to do all of the work and were very pleased with the end result.  We gave Lily some water colors and she was so happy we trusted her with them.  Her mouth was completely green by the time she was done but most of the paint did actually make it on the pumpkin so I'd say it was mostly a win.

 We even whipped out the blow dryer to help move things along.

 Audrey made a vampire but she wanted it to have yellow hair just like her.

 Julia recently read Bunnicula and turned her pumpkin into the vampire bunny from the book.  I thought they turned out fabulous.  The nice things was they were done completely by the girls with minimal parent intervention.  They were really proud of the final results.

 We attended Audrey's party the following week.  We walked through all of the classrooms with her BFF Olivia.

 Lily sat by Audrey the entire time thinking she was such a big girl.

 More insane amounts of food.  So so so much food.