Happy Halloween!

(I found this costume at DI and couldn't resist! It's just too cute.)

We had a really fun week getting ready for Halloween. There's been some kind of Halloween fun almost every day. On Monday we made Halloween sugar cookies for FHE. On Tuesday we had a little party with some friends. We played a couple games like pin the hat on the witch and a mummy wrapping race, and we also had some Halloween treats. It was a lot of fun and we were glad some of our friends could come!

Grant was the Hunchback of Notre Dame and I was Esmeralda. Lydia was a cute little flower.

Tom and Kandis dressed as each other! Kandis was an unemployed BYU fanatic while Tom was a pregnant nurse. Yep, Kandis is pregnant!

Amber and Ben came, too! Amber was a devil, Tyler was a bear, Trenton was a dinosaur and Ben claims he was a naked man in clothes. :)

The mummy wrap---the girls won!

After the boys realized they had lost, they just had fun with it and started taping Ben up! Luckily he had a pocket knife and was able to cut himself out.

Fun with the kids' costumes

Lydia was so good the whole night. What a sweety she is!

Pin the hat on the witch.

On Thursday Grant and I carved our pumpkins. We even got a smaller pumpkin for little Lydia so she wouldn't feel left out. :)

The look of concentration. It's intense. When Grant saw this photo of himself, he said, "Is that really what I look like when I'm focused on something?!?"

By the time I finished mine and Lydia's pumpkins, Grant was just barely putting the finishing touches on his.

All that hard work paid off! Grant's pumpkin turned out really cool. Can you tell which pumpkin was for Lydia?

(Grant was concentrating so hard on the video game that not even a child on his head could distract him!)

Friday we made a quick trip to Afton, WY to visit Grant's brother for his birthday. We played games with the kids, visited Aaron's school where he teaches, and had cake and icecream. I made a Halloween cake for Aaron, but it was devoured too fast for me to snap a picture!

We had a fun time with Aaron and his boys. We came back Saturday morning to make our final preparations for Halloween night!

This is the best picture of Lydia's costume, but as you can tell, she was not in the mood to pose for pictures.

Ahh, the pacifier. Much better.

This year was our best year ever for decorations and trick-or-treaters. We had tiki torches surrounding the yard, a strobe light, a black light, a fog machine, and lots of spooky decorations to set the mood.

Grant's parents got us this creepy guy. It is sound activated and waves its arms around screaming!

A stuffed dummy or Grant in disguise?

This is the real thing. Grant did a really great job at posing and scaring trick-or-treaters. It was his thrill of the night.

A bubbling witch's brew.

Can you find Grant lurking in the shadows? He had lots of different hiding spots and poses. The zombie on the ground would periodically blow fog from his mouth. There was spooky music playing as well as a sound activated ghost on a zip line.

Last year was a disappointment in terms of the number of trick-or-treaters, so we were unprepared for the large crowds this year! We actually ran out of candy! Maybe word spread about our house. I think the recent opening of the elementary school right by our house helped us advertise since kids walked by it everyday on their way to and from school and saw all the decorations. One of the best scares that night was a group of girls that were at the door knocking. Grant came up behind them and scared them. As I came to answer the door, they were pounding on it and one girl pressed her face up against the door window and said "Get me out of here!". Don't worry, I don't think anyone suffered permanent damage--no therapy sessions will be needed. Almost every time, by the time I answered the door to hand out candy, the kids were no longer screaming, but laughing and saying how cool our house was. Grant also got a good scare out of some of his deacons in the ward, so he felt pretty satisfied.