Parades, Parties, Pizza & Pumpkins, oh my!

Friday was a busy day for us (and probably most families in America) ... the kids had their Halloween parades and parties. Can I say this? Sometimes people ask if we "celebrate" Halloween. I always feel uncomfortable with the term "celebrate" ... I know Halloween has its origins in satanic worship and such, so I wouldn't say we "celebrate" it. And we certainly want to have nothing to do with satan. But we do have fun dressing in costumes and collecting candy from our neighbors and carving jack-o-lanterns, and I think that that is all in good, harmless fun. We don't made a huge deal out of it aside from that.

The morning started with convincing Carter that wearing his costume was a good idea. :) But ultimately he put on his Spiderman costume (minus the mask that scared him) with no problems and had a fun morning at preschool, parading and partying throughout the morning.

This is how Carter looked for most of the parade....

What is going on here? And why are all these people looking at us and taking pictures?

I did get this good shot of him.
I love that he is parading between 2 girls. When I ask him who he played with at preschool, most of the time, he lists a few girls' names. Can you tell the kid has grown up with sisters and a neighborhood full of girls? The good news is he will be one darn good husband someday!

Home for lunch, and then off to Schuylkill Elementary!

Audrey, my little leopard.
The school has a theme and this year it was "Reading around the world" - the 1st graders were assigned to choose something from Asia, Australia, New Zealand or Antarctica.
Obviously this included the animals ...

Audrey's class

Audrey and classmates enjoying cupcakes at their party.
I didn't want to put too many party pictures up ... some people don't like pictures of their kids on the internet.

I made homemade pizza for dinner and then we carved pumpkins.
Well, Chad and I carved, the kids scooped out the guts.
And Chloe went to bed for most of this activity.

Carter designed his own face for the jack-o-lantern.
I was pretty impressed!

Happy with the results!

Happy Trick-or-Treating!
from the Audrey, Carter & Chloe Pumpkin family :)