The good thing about being a technology hoarder is that when your laptop breaks your husband can find an old one he reformatted to run some crazy obscure operating system and fix it up with nice normal stuff like Windows and Picasa so you don’t go into laptop withdrawal  It also means you can post pictures of your family trip to the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular in a semi-timely manner. Hooray for my awesome husband!

The Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular was pretty spectacular. I’d heard it can be insanely crowded on most nights, so we planned as well as we could for a non-busy time: the last night it was on, after Halloween, we had advanced tickets and we got there before they opened. It worked, really well actually. We were the third people in line at the start of the trail and the hardest part was entertaining two toddlers who are used to being allowed to run wild at the zoo. Caroline was being particularly…toddler-like, so keeping track of her once they opened the trail was hard, especially because she refused to ride in the luxury of her stroller. I’m really glad we went and that we got to see it – but I don’t think we’ll be going back until the kids are old enough to appreciate the pumpkins.

Those are all real pumpkins, really carved by hand, and each lit individually by LEDs. They do a theme each year, and this one was something about great films or stars of stage and screen or…whatever. The best part was that they piped John Williams movie theme music through the whole thing. At the end there’s a giant tree FULL of pumpkins called The Laughing Tree. Even though it was the last night of the display there was a guy carving a pumpkin larger than both of my children combined. And the best part we got to see it all, go home, and be in bed at a nice decent hour.

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Despite a stormy start to the week (and a complete lack of preschool – oh my how I missed preschool) we managed to have a pretty good week.

Sunday:

If our church wasn’t so pretty, I don’t think we would go nearly as often.

I lose a staring contest with this fish.

Who is ever unhappy at Five Guys?

Monday:

The wind was blowing the rain sideways into our screened porch

Windy

Hey, so when can we stop watching the boring news and go play outside instead?

Tuesday:

Weather checker

How do I look?

Time to take the baby cage down

Wednesday:

Oh no! A dragon has invaded gymnastics class!

Look, we caught a fairy!

COME HEEEEERE CHILDREN! WE HAVE CAAAAAANDY!

Thursday:

Block building is all fun and games until someone smashes someone else’s tower

These (in the 3rd floor master bedroom) are the only windows in the house low enough for them to look out of and they’re obsessed.

I swear I feed this child more food than anyone else in the whole house. She just burns ALL THE CALORIES.

Friday:

Boss of the mall hooligans

One of Caroline’s many wonderful friend-helper-playmates #cardigansforever

I like this movie sort of a ridiculous amount

Saturday:

I’ve been buying 3 dozen at a time but keep running out. This is what happens when you give up carbs.

Suspicious of being dragged out in the cold to look at decorative gourds.

A mind-blowing number of decorative gourds. I got some fantastic pictures for Monday.

I spent three full hours running errands blissfully alone on a Saturday – although I had forgotten how crowded everyone is on the weekend. I also forgot how expensive it is to do two weeks worth of grocery shopping at once, and might have had a tiny heart attack at the checkout. This is our last week before E’s schedule goes back to being totallycompletelymiserable for a while, so we’re splurging on doing nothing but enjoying our extra hour of sleep on Sunday. I have it in my head I’m going to brutally clean out of my closet – everything I don’t love goes! – but I suspect I’ll only get as far as putting away half the laundry before I lose interest.

Did you take iPhone photos of your week? Link up with one or several below! I’ve been doing this for more than 2 years now, and I’m a little sad it seems to be dying out now that Amy handed the linky off to me. So PLEASE please consider joining, even if you haven’t done it before. I’ll be around to read everyone’s posts and comment.

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I’d sort of been dreading Halloween. Caroline isn’t the biggest fan of costumes and when she doesn’t want to wear something she ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT WEAR IT. Evan changed his mind 15 times on what he wanted to be, so getting him into a costume we actually had in the house was doubtful. We failed at trick-or-treating at Sesame Place, they had no interest in dressing up for the Seaport or the Aquarium events, and the idea of drag-carry-pushing two kids up and down the hills in my neighborhood was giving me a migraine in advance. I’d been looking for excuses to get out of it pretty much all week, but they managed to behave JUST well enough that I couldn’t take away their Halloween after the Little Einsteins got them so jazzed up about it.

His shirt says “Will Trade Sister For Candy”

It turns out that sometimes lowering your expectations is the best thing you can do. Since all I was hoping for was one block of non-complaining children who said “thank you” after getting a piece of candy, I was blown away by my super polite, super friendly, willing to take turns, willing to walk on their own 2 feet, pleasant, costume-wearing children who made it three blocks before we came home and handed out candy instead, since leaving a bucket with a note that said “Please take 2 pieces!” led to an EMPTY BUCKET after only half an hour. Either we had 200 trick-or-treaters in 30 minutes or some people are douchebags who can’t follow directions.

Since I was pretty much expecting that to happen, I actually saved the good candy for Evan and Caroline to hand out. BOOM. That’s what you get for being jerkfaces, neighborhood kids. Enjoy your fireballs and generic lollipops. Too bad your parents never loved you enough to take you trick-or-treating themselves and teach you how to get whole handfuls of candy from old ladies who think you are absolutely the cutest thing they’ve ever seen.

You know, like my kids:

Caroline vetoed the tutu that was supposed to go under the skirt, but wore the wings all night – which is more than I was hoping for. I’m still ridiculously proud I made her costume.

We only had one person totally baffled by Evan’s costume. I said “It’s from ‘Where The Wild Things Are?’” She said “Oh, my kids are grown up, I don’t know about these shows kids are watching nowadays.”

E made it home in time to come with us, which made the kids super happy

A little flashlight thrown into one of those $1 pumpkin buckets makes a GREAT light for trick-or-treating.

We had a great time. We gave out $35 worth of candy from our house, even to the way-too-old kids who couldn’t be bothered to dress up. At one point, three teenage boys wearing hats and scarves stood on my steps and sang “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”, then asked if I had any candy canes or figgy pudding (they turned down my very sincere offer of a whole handful of candy since I got such a kick out of them). We let the kids eat several pieces of candy and enjoy their sugar buzz for an hour before Caroline went into a trance in front of Mickey Mouse and we made them go to bed.

I hope your Halloween was just as fun! Now please excuse me while I throw myself FULL FORCE into Caroline’s 2nd birthday party.

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1. Paleo pumpkin bars so I’ll be less tempted to eat the Oreos.
2. Our patio is prepared for the storm.
3. The last of my Halloween decorations that probably no one will see.
4. Glued to the TV for updates.
5. Giant tree less than 7 feet from my back porch. I heard from the previous owners this tree’s twin on the other side of our yard fell during a hurricane a few years ago so it’s my biggest worry.
6. Guest room ready in case local friends are evacuated.
7. Brutus is pretty worried.
8. Bathtub full of water for emergency toilet-flushing.
9. The kids just think it’s awesome that Daddy has the day off.

This is our second storm in as many years, but Irene didn’t do much more than make a mess. We’re hopeful Sandy isn’t any worse, but the updates from the new stations and weather channel are starting to sound serious and not just in the standard OMG-END-OF-THE-WORLD exaggerated way we’re used to in New England.

We aren’t in danger of flooding or being evacuated ourselves, so we’re just waiting for the winds to pick up later today and praying we don’t lose power for too long or have a tree come through the roof. Luckily E took care of his last urgent work thing this morning and none of us have to leave the house again until at least tomorrow. I’m trying to balance being reasonably concerned with not freaking out, but when the governor closes the roads – like, ALL the roads – it’s hard to keep my anxiety at bay. For now, I’m cheerfully eating Halloween candy and enjoying frivolous electricity usage while I still can. Sending safe thoughts and prayers for everyone in the path of the storm. As long as our house is still standing you’re more than welcome here if you need somewhere to go.

4 pm Update: Still good, still have power. The wind is getting sort of crazy and we’ll be “camping” on the main floor tonight instead of sleeping upstairs tonight but so far we’re OK.

10 pm Update: Power still on, just a few flickers so far. Sent the kids up to bed because we were going CRAZY with all of us in one room all day and the way the wind is blowing means our two scary trees would fall away from the house. We are still HAPPY to host anyone who needs somewhere to go tomorrow, although I’ve heard a ton of roads are blocked by downed trees. Stay safe friends!

8 pm Tuesday Update: Hello friends! I forget sometimes that I’m not real-life (or at least Facebook) friends with everyone, so I forgot to update here. We made it through the storm with no problems. E even had to go into work today although Evan’s preschool was cancelled. We’ll have our porch light on tomorrow for trick-or-treaters (after a quick stop at Target to replace all the candy we ate!) and we’re hoping the neighbors do the same for our first time out!

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