The aquarium always does fun stuff for Halloween and we’ve been going since Evan was a baby. This year the costume dress up weekend was “Pirate and Princess” themed. Unfortunately, I spend a bazillion dollars on costumes that are not pirates or princesses but were TOTALLY aquarium appropriate…so the kids dressed up anyway.

Although they weren’t eligible for the pirate/princess costume contests, I can promise you Evan won Unofficial Best Costume, just based on the fact that EVERY person we saw commented on it. Because it’s AMAZING.

p.s. The weird spacing thing on photos with captions makes me crazy but I cannot fix it so try not to let it drive you crazy too.

She traded her mermaid crown for one she made in the craft room

LOOK AT THAT COSTUME

They loved all the throwing games to win “pirate gold”

I wonder if the seals are getting nervous about the shark staring at them.

There’s an art installation set up about ocean pollution. This one was adorable/sad.

He’s goldfish. FYI.

Evan saw the pirate and yelled “JACK SPARROW!” and the pirate said “CAPTAIN. It’s CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow!” This was like the 5th time we ran into him just walking around, obviously they’re BFF’s now.

This is the best I can do for family photos right now.

Sorry Linc.

Then we went home and painted/carved pumpkins, something we never managed to get around to last year. Painting is genius, since carving is such a PITA.

I’ve already posted these pictures in other places so apologies if you’ve already seen them. Feel free to roll your eyes at me for showing off my adorable kid all over the place. STFU Parents, amirite?

p.s. How excited am I that he wore this costume again this year? (Last year’s photos here) It makes spending way to many dollars on that Max suit hurt a lot less.

She is a mermaid princess, in case that was unclear by the random blue dress.

The light-up sneakers are a nice addition to the costumes, don’t you think?

It really might as well be week one million. It feels like week one million.

Sunday:

I hung out with the cutest, chillest baby ever at the Community Baby Shower

My teeny little table showing off my work

Don’t worry, I pulled over before I took this picture out the car window of the regatta in the river

Monday:

I took this picture AND threw that ball. Impressed????

School makes him tired.

Princess Sadface was sad, so we had lots of extra cuddles

Tuesday:

I bought ALL THE GROCERIES. I also broke my crock pot (the second one!) so I can’t make half the stuff I planned.

I like this spot.

Evan likes this spot too.

Wednesday:

Saying good morning to Fred, the giant fake Halloween spider

Face painting at school. She meowed all afternoon.

Reading on the front porch

Thursday:

All the RescueBots HAVE to come outside to wait for the bus with Evan.

Mr. Incredible from Enterprise. They’re office of superheroes was the best part of my day.

Trick or treating at the fancy houses

They actually liked handing out candy more than collecting it

Friday:

It wasn’t actually raining, but the gingers do not care. Umbrellas make them look jaunty.

WTF Target, it’s only NOVEMBER FIRST.

I wasted fancy hair and spanx on a lousy event for E’s work.

Saturday:

My assistant at the morning photo shoot got a liiiiitle dirty

We have too many couches right now, but at least it means they can watch iPad OVER THERE and leave me alone.

Yes, she is wearing her costume AGAIN. At least it was at a costume party.

E’s submarine was commission on Saturday, which means they’re one step closer to being a fully functioning boat that goes to sea. That is both good news (no more shipyard!) and bad news (deployments) but it also means he’s going to be working even more over the next couple of weeks. Since this is still the busy season for pictures too, I suspect there will be a lot of late nights for the next month. Although it hardly matters now, since it’s 4:55 pm and PITCH BLACK outside. Thanks for nothing, daylight savings time.

In blog news: I’m about 3 meals into a brand new round of What’s For Dinner – which I haven’t done in a crazy long time – and it’s nice to be cooking new stuff again. I can only handle taco salad and spaghetti so many times before I give up and let my family eat pop tarts and grapes for dinner. So watch for that sometime next week!

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.

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.