Halloween!

We carved our pumpkins on Oct. 27th for Family Home Evening.  

 Cute little Bella really enjoyed scooping out all of her pumpkin guts this year.  

I can't believe this girl is 5!

 Noah was a little grossed out by all the guts. He didn't want to stick his hands in at all.  

 He worked really hard to scoop everything out of his pumpkin, though.

 Don't let the face fool you...she loved every minute of this.  She was up to her elbows in slimy pumpkin guts.

 She's such an actress...

 Garrett--always being silly.  :)

 Noah's finished pumpkin.  He was so excited to use the little knives to help carve his pumpkin.  

 The finished products.

October 30th

Lydia was chosen to be Student of the Month for her 5th grade class.  

Her teacher is Mrs. Anderson, who is a really wonderful teacher and person.  Lydia got to go up in front of the whole school to accept her award and the teacher said some really lovely things about her.  

 Up on stage

 This was hanging in the school when we went to Parent Teacher Conferences.  

And this is what Mrs. Anderson wrote about Lydia.  

I was so proud of Lydia--she is a great student and a great person and friend!  

Later that night after dinner, Garrett asked if I wanted to open my birthday presents.  My birthday is Nov. 13th, so he was a few weeks early.  But I knew he really wanted me to open them, so I did.  

 He got me these two awesome Halloween pictures to hang up.  I have one already that I bought a couple of years ago and then he surprised me with these two new ones.  I love them.  He wanted me to open them early so that I could enjoy them for Halloween.  He's so thoughtful!

October 31

Halloween!!

Noah and Maggie were the only ones that were allowed to dress up at school on Halloween.  It's such a bummer that they don't let the elementary school kids dress up.  

 This is Noah's preschool class in their costumes.  So cute!

 This is Noah and his buddies at school.  Cooper--Jake the pirate, Noah--the race car driver and Ethan--Darth Vader.

 After Bella and Noah got home from school, we worked on some Halloween crafts.  I had these monster ones and then my mom sent me home with a couple of crafts when I came back from Utah.  The kids all love doing crafts!

 Doorhangers

 Bracelets

 Lydia and Paige joined in when they got home.

 This was another last minute decoration for Halloween.  Eyeballs for our bushes.  We need to get some sort of spotlight though to shine on them, because you couldn't see them in the dark.  

 This was our candy stash this year.  I think it was 9 bags and over 1000 pieces.  All of it given away to the many trick-or-treaters that we get.  We love it!

 My trick-or-treaters ready to hit the street!  Paige--Pocahontas, Bella--Jessie, Lydia--Officer McKibben and Noah--race car driver.  Maggie had dressed up as Red Riding Hood, but I didn't get a picture.  She stayed home and handed out candy while Garrett and I went out with the other kids.  

Garrett didn't dress up, but I went as a witch.  It was my 4th costume this Halloween season. 

 I love taking pictures as we trick-or-treat, but they never turn out in the dark.  

 Noah really loved it--again.  He'd come back from each house saying, "I got candy!"  This is a great age for Halloween!

Happy Halloween and welcome November!

McKibben Halloween Monster Mash

On Monday Oct. 28th, we had our family Halloween Party.  This year's theme was "Monsters".  As I was looking for ideas for the party, I kept seeing fun activities and food centered around cute monsters, so I thought that would make a cute theme.  I usually don't have themes for Halloween parties, but I thought it would be fun!  

 The invitation that I made for all of the kids.  I think Noah carried his around for days.

 This was the before we started with the costume game.  Everyone holding their bags wondering which costume they were going to be this year.  Bella looks mad, but that's her new thing.  She either doesn't like to smile for pictures or makes a really weird face. 

Introducing....

SUPERMAN!!!

 Doc McStuffins

 A Honey Bee

 Cleopatra

 The Iron Chef

 Vampire

 And very mismatched '80's chick

I really somehow wanted us all to dress up as different monsters, but I couldn't figure out how to make that work.  I think these worked better anyways.  

The Dinner

 Our Monster Table

 Getting ready to serve up the monster grub.  

Monster Menu

 I didn't do a very good job of taking pictures of the food as I was making it, so I snapped a picture before I sat down to eat.  

Going through the menu:

 the monster drool was the drink and I found a pineapple lemonade that was really good and I dyed it green. 

Monster head was cornbread that I cut with a Frankenstein's head cookie cutter.  (It's the top middle thing) 

Monster belly lint was cream cheese and bacon balls that were covered in shredded cheddar cheese (pictured below).  They really weren't very good, but I thought they made good belly lint.  :)

Monster arms were probably my favorite.  They were the noodles coming out of the hot dogs.  Before you cook them, you stick spaghetti (I used linguini, so the arms looked thicker) into cut up hot dogs and then you cook them and they look like this:

I think they were my kid's favorites, too.  

Monster eyeballs were the cookies.  

They looked incredibly cute, but they didn't taste that great.  

And last of all were the Monster boogers...nice!  They were meatballs in sauce.  The sauce oddly enough was bbq sauce and grape jelly.  That's it...nice and easy and they tasted pretty good too.  

Decoration

I was meaning to make this door decoration before the kids got home from school to have it as part of our party decorations, but I was behind in getting ready for the party.  So I gave that job to Lydia to do and she made this cute monster guy.  

Games

We started off with 2 different, but similar games, both called "Feed the Monster". 

 I made monsters on 2 sides of a box and cut out holes for the mouths.  This way 2 kids could play at once.  All they did was roll marbles or bouncy balls or whatever kind of ball, and try to get it through the monster's mouth.  It was fun for the little kids.  

 Then we took the Monster and set it at an angle.  Then we gathered up our victims--Little People--and tossed them to the monster to feed him.  

Our next game was to catch little monsters in a web. 

 This is the web that I created out of masking tape.  We needed one side sticky to catch our monsters. 

 I found these cute little plush monsters at Oriental Trading Company, and I found that they would be perfect for our game.  If you threw them just right, they would stick to the tape.  

 Our next game was Monster "Glow in the Dark" Bowling.  Bella helped me make our Monsters before the other kids got home from school that day.  Right before we bowled, we put in glow sticks.  

 I thought they looked really cool in the dark.  We did bowl in the dark, but it was hard to take pictures in the dark, so we did some both ways.  

Our next game was "Building Your Own Monster"

I had cut out various body shapes and given one to each of the kids.  They were each given a dice and they had to roll the dice to see what kind of body part they were adding.  Polka dots, eyes, mouths, horns/antennae, teeth or fur.  Then they rolled again to see how many of that item to add.  If they rolled a one and added polka dots, even if they rolled a one again, they couldn't add any more polka dots.  

Lydia was funny and didn't play exactly according to the rules.  She kind of altered hers so it would look the way she wanted it.  Which turned out to be cute.  

The finished monsters. 

Our last game was called "Monster Brain Scavenger Hunt".  My sister did this last year with her kids and I just loved it.  It took quite a bit of preparation, but I think my kids really enjoyed it.  

 First I had to prepare the monster brains...aka...colored spaghetti.  I love how the colors look.

Then I hid 11 treasures into each one and gave them the list of things to find.  

 Ready to start searching their monster brains.

 Noah ready to dig in

 I love his face in this one..."you want me to stick my hands in there?"

 Lydia started getting a little crazy with hers.   

 Trying to find them with her teeth

 Found an eyeball!

 After they found all their treasures, they just wanted to play with the spaghetti.  How often do they get to do that?  

So, that was the end of our party.  Poor Maggie...everything is geared to the little kids and she plays a long and is a good sport.  Maybe next year she'll have time to help me plan it and run the games.  It's hard when there's such a big age gap.  But, it was a fun night!