After lunch, I dropped James at preschool then headed to Haden's school to watch his Halloween parade. The parents stand in the gym and all the classes parade though in full costume. It's always fun to see so many different costumes. After his parade, I joined him in the classroom for a short party.
After dropping Haden off at home, I headed off to James's preschool to catch the end of his celebration. I hadn't told him that I would be coming so he was very excited to have me join him on the carpet for story time. At snack time he told me that my knees have to be under the table. I was sitting in a tiny chair, at a very short table and couldn't comply with this rule very well.
After preschool we all had some downtime at home before getting our costumes on for trick-or-treating. I took advantage of this time by running a virtual 5k that I had signed up for. A virtual race is done on your own (on the streets, treadmill, trails- wherever) and you time yourself and then submit your time to the website. With this race, I also got t-shirt and race number to wear and then in a couple of weeks I'll get a cool race medal to display.
Most of Halloween day was overcast and rainy so I really wasn't excited about taking the kids around the neighborhood. Luckily, the rain ended about 5 minutes before we headed out. We walked around with our friends from across the street and the kids had a blast. They needed constant reminders to "slow down" because the adults didn't want to sprint just to keep up!
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Here is a pile of their candy stash. It's over 7 pounds. We had them split it up and they each put their treats into a Kitchen Safe. This is a special lock box that I got recently from a Kickstarter project. It has a timer on top which you can set from 1 min up to 7 days. I have it set to open at 7am each morning. The kids then pick out 4 pieces of candy and re-lock the box to open again at 7 the next morning. They can eat the 4 pieces all at once or throughout the day but they know they can't have more until the next morning.
Oh, and here are the pumpkins we carved this year. James chose Daniel Tiger (from a cartoon of the same name) and Haden chose Jake (Jake and the Neverland Pirates)
My latest homemade baking challenge was cinnamon rolls. The kids love the Pillsbury refrigerated rolls but I really wanted to try some at home since I'm getting the hang of using yeast now. I searched out a recipe with great reviews and gave it a try. It always takes so much longer than I anticipate because my dough is so slow to rise. I was so excited to try a roll right away, but I was a bit disappointed. The frosting was delicious, but the roll lacked flavor. However, I put the rest of them in the fridge and brought them out for breakfast today and I thought the flavor improved a ton.
The last thing I'll mention for this post if the Rainbow Loom. Haden's friend received one for her birthday a little while ago and he's been seeing kids at school wearing these bracelets so he begged me to buy him one. It didn't take much convincing because I enjoy crafty stuff like this anyways and I think I've had more fun with it than he has. The idea is that you use small, colored rubber bands and twist them around a loom. Then you use a crochet-type hook to un-hook the bands. The finished project is a bracelet. The kit only comes with instructions on how to make a very basic bracelet but you get onto YouTube and there are endless videos (created by young kids) that walk you step-by-step through many other patterns. Haden has been wearing a few and is also taking requests from his classmates to make more. I'm not so sure his teacher is as excited about this new trend but it's not banned at school yet. Here he is sporting a few:
