Fall-in

I have to admit, I have been captivated by the views I have seen this fall . . . 

Gorgeous.

I don't know if I was too busy getting us settled to see things clearly last year, or if this year has been full of more beauty?  Maybe a little bit of both . . .but I have definitely enjoyed keeping my eyes on the mountains as the colors emerged.   We even took another drive through the Alpine Loop, and stopped to take some family pictures, and get the kids' first of the year shots. . . 

They are all getting so grown up!  

The family pictures may not have been perfectly posed, but I love the individuality they showcase, so I'm going to go with that. 

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This guy turned 14 on a busy, busy day.  We needed to get our foreign exchange student off so he could make his way home, and knew there were activities at night, but managed to have some personalized breakfast:  Nutella tortillas and hot cocoa, 

open presents:  including one from the exchange student (how thoughtful!), and a large bag of jelly belly jelly beans.  This boy and sugar . . . 

He watched a cooking show earlier in the month, and the entire thing was on Meatloaf if I remember correctly . . . so naturally his special birthday meal had to feature Meatloaf! (I can't remember the last time I made meatloaf, but I must admit, it was quite tasty)

 Shortly after dinner, we were ready to go to our Ward Halloween carnival.  We were complete with Dorothy, Good Witch Glenda, the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion (Though the mane only stayed on for this picture), Wicked Witch of the West, and the Scare Crow.  It was nice to remove the face paint when the evening was over, but fun to get into the spirit of things. 

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 The night before Halloween, we went out to the front porch and picked which of the pumpkins we each wanted to carve.  Even though there were plenty of carving pumpkins, our littlest one had to have a little sweet pumpkin of course. . . 

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Halloween day the kiddos dressed up for school, had Halloween parties, and Lil performed Thriller with all the other 6th graders.  She was completely into it, and did a great job.  

With the busy day, I decided to give the Jack-o-lantern pizza's a try so that I didn't have to worry about dinner, and we were all fans.  We had some great friends join us and some of my single siblings handed out candy so we could all go out together with the littles and my brother's family around the neighborhood.  

Benjamin went off with his friends for the night trick-or-treating and playing games, Lily met up with a friend as we were out, and so it was truly just our littles we were with . . . 

This little one would have no help with her big bag of loot.  We walked around from house to house for about an hour and a half, and only when we were back on our street, just a little bit from the house would she be carried.  I think her bag was close to 10 or 12 pounds.  She just bounded around, sometimes veering close to the edge of the sidewalk, but always determined to do it herself.  I thought it was adorable.

I think this candy is going to be around for quite some time . . . 

In the past we consolidated the lute, and would just pull it down from time to time to let the kiddos have a few. . . This year, we are going to give the each-have-their-own-bag technique a try . . . we shall see how it goes.