Halloween 2008

Our Halloween turned out pretty fun....

When Lars got home from work we got the boys back in their costumes and headed down to the Halloween Carnival that the elementary school was putting on. I think the rest of Providence was there too-it was so packed! But they did a pretty good job with it. There were lots of fun games and activities, but the only one Ashton wanted to do was to go through the spook alley. Twice with Lars, then after looking around to see if there was anything else he wanted to do, he wanted to go through again so I took him.

I took this picture as we were walking from the truck to the school.

I love it!

I just think it's so cute of all of my boys and I imagine myself years down the road looking back at it and smiling at the memories of this Halloween.

After the carnival we took them to two of my friends' houses.

Angie and Ann really wanted to see them dressed up.

Thanks for the treats you guys!

Then we figured we'd better come home and get a little something to eat before we started around the neighborhood. Plus everyone was still at the carnival, so there would have been no one to trick or treat to yet anyway.

Finally around 6:30 it was time to go out and knock on some doors...the moment was finally here...but after Ashton having been so excited to trick-or-treat, we only ended up going to 4 or 5 houses before he was done and wanted to go home! This is all the candy he ended up with...but that was fine with me. (and yes I helped myself to that Reese's peanut butter cup :)I think he loved the idea of being a ghost and really liked his costume, but after wearing it for awhile it got uncomfortable and hard to see out of (especially when it got dark) because just like usual as soon as we got home he stripped down to his shorts and t-shirt. Then he had a blast handing out candy to everyone that came to our door. He loved seeing all of the costumes and picking out a certain piece of candy for each kid.

With the beautiful weather we could have stayed out till 10:00! It never did cool off and I think it was about 55 degrees while we were trick-or-treating. I never remember a Halloween like this. Usually it's freezing!

Gunnar of course loved getting out and didn't mind his costume at all!Lots of people commented how cute he looked as a monkey and one lady at the carnival even asked us if she could snap a quick picture of him with her cell phone because she loved it so much!

All in all a great Halloween...Oh and awhile after we got home Ashton said

"Hey Mommy, I never did see any real ghosts did you?"

Happy??? Halloween

Halloween is finally here and it started out pretty much like I thought it might. "Is it time to go trick-or-treating yet??? Why not? When do we get to go? Why does it have to be dark???" Ashton is just way to excited for it to finally happen. So he was pretty grumpy all morning knowing that it is Halloween, but that nothing is really happening yet. Lars wanted me to go by his work with the boys in their costumes, so we got ready to do that this morning and of course when it was time go Ashton didn't want to. But I made him anyway so we could at least get out of the house for a little while to kill some time before it's time to go trick-or-treating for real tonight. So after we went there and showed off their costumes (and already got way too much candy) I decided on the way home to go take some pictures of them. Of course Ashton was really excited about that. He stayed in the car for the first 10 minutes while I tried to get some cute shots of Gunnar, then I finally got him to put his costume back on and come out and I got about 3 shots of him before he was done.

As you can see Ashton's costume of choice is a ghost. He has been SO excited to finally get his costume, so I finally gave it to him after preschool yesterday. He had fun wearing it around yesterday trying to scare Gunnar and waiting impatiently for Lars to get home from work, so he could jump out and scare him.

Now he keeps asking me when the "real ghosts" are going to come out. He must have asked me that a long time ago and I don't remember saying it, but he says that I told him they come out after dark. So part of the reason he is so excited to go out tonight after dark is because he really thinks he's going to see some real ghosts flying around! Oops!
Hey maybe he will!Here is Gunnar in the monkey costume that Ashton wore his first Halloween...
(eating the leaves again)The lighting must have been a lot different the day I took the pictures of Ashton-it looks like it's a totally different color on Gunnar.
Here they both are...Anyway hopefully now that the day is finally here we can all go out and have some fun tonight and even get back in time to hand out some candy at our own house!

Another month already???

Gunnar is 7 months old today!

And yes I'm going to do a post every month older he gets :)

He just keeps getting cuter and cuter...he actually sat up really well today for a long time for the first time, so I took a bunch of pictures of him playing in the leaves.

He mostly just wanted to try to eat them so it was hard to get him to look at me, but he loved being outside.

It was such a nice day!

Oh and Ashton was having lots of fun too...putting all of our leaves in a big pile, then running and jumping in them with his friend Tyler.

Past Halloweens

As we are looking forward to Halloween this next Friday, I can't help but look back on the past 3 Halloweens with Ashton. I've always loved Halloween...just dressing up when I was a kid and trick-or-treating ( a lot of times in the snow! ) in Wyoming, and even when I was in highschool I remember going to Salt Lake with friends to haunted houses and dressing up at school and just the fact that it's fall time- I just love the feel of this time of year. But it's even more fun now with kids especially this year with Ashton being so excited about it all!

We had so much fun his first Halloween when he was about 9 1/2 months old dressing him up as a monkey-he was so cute! We took him around to a few of our neighbors' houses, then came home and handed out candy.

Obviously that Halloween was more for us since he had no clue what was going on! Then when he was 2, he was soooo into the Backyardigans so I had to get him this Tyrone the Moose costume that year-he was kind of starting to understand a little bit and thought it was fun to carry his little pumpkin bucket around to the neighbors houses again-

I think he even ate a few pieces of candy that year.

Finally last year I figured it was my last year to choose for him, so I got this UPS Man costume and he was SO cute in it. People commented on it wherever we went. It was a big hit! He had fun in it too-for whatever reason he called it his P.U. Mess Man costume! This year Ashton chose what he wanted to be about a month and a half ago, but I waited to order his costume until it got a little closer figuring he would change his mind...but he has stuck with his first choice and is so excited to wear it! I haven't given it to him yet, because I know he would wear it every second till Halloween, then might be sick of it by the time he's really supposed to wear it.

Stay tuned to see what he chose!

Oh and of course to see how cute Gunnar looks in his :)

A cold night at the Corn Maze

We have been telling Ashton the past couple weeks that we would take him to a corn maze (not that he really knew what it was...but he was excited anyway), so last night we finally did. First we went to Arctic Circle to get a kid's meal because they have little Halloween flashlights as the toy and he wanted one to take to the maze. Then we drove across the parking lot to Old Grist Mill, so Lars and I could get some non-fast food. Then off we went to The American West Heritage Center to check out the corn maze & everything else they have going on out there. By the time we got there it was just getting dark...and colder than I thought it would be. I had packed hats for the boys and me, but no gloves for Ashton and he just had on a t-shirt and jeans and a fleece pullover. Gunnar had on a little fleece outfit and I had a blanket for him. I guess I wasn't really thinking it would be that cold or I would have packed winter coats and gloves! It was pretty darn cold. We went inside and bought our tickets, then went and got on the wagon pulled by horses to go out to the corn maze. As the horses started off it kind of jerked the wagon and I swear Ashton almost fell out the back! It scared me to death. I grabbed him and put him on the other side of me and made sure I held onto him the rest of the ride. After about a 5 minute ride, they dropped us off (it was completely dark at that point besides all of the Halloween decorations & lights), so we walked around for a few minutes, then found the kid maze..which Ashton LOVED! It was just made out of a bunch of hay bales and to him it was like a giant fort to play in. I think he would have been happy to play there for hours. But we figured we had better check out the corn maze before it got even colder. So we got a map (which ended up being pointless) and headed in. It was huge! And thank goodness for Ashton's little ghost light because it was really dark too. The girl we talked to before we went in that worked there said that you could get through in about 25 mintues if you knew exactly where you were going. So after we were in there for awhile I kind of started to freak out that we could be in there with two little boys freezing for a couple of hours. At that point I started praying to St. Anthony that we would find our way out quickly. Before we went much further Lars and I decided we should probably try to backtrack the way we came to get back to the entrance rather than get even further in. Luckily we made it back out in about 15 minutes and we went into one of the buildings they have there where there happened to be an LDS activity night going on and they were nice enough to offer us some hot chocolate and donuts. That is one thing Ashton can't say no to-he loves donuts and Gunnar would have loved one too if he could have had one! So we warmed up for a few more minutes, then Lars took Ashton out to play in the kid maze for a few more minutes while we waited for the horse wagon to come back and get us. Then after a cold ride back to the truck we headed home. Even in the cold Gunnar never got fussy-I've decided that he loves getting out of the house-he was happy the entire time. It doesn't hurt that we packed him around all night too. Other than the cold it was a fun night!

Pumpkin Head

So we had just gotten home from our walk this morning and I laid Gunnar on a blanket on the living room floor and Ashton was just playing there with him, so I ran downstairs for no more than 3 minutes when I hear Gunnar crying. Not so unusual if I leave the room, but this time it was one of those "I'm in pain" cries that had me running up the stairs fast to see what happened.

So what did I find you ask???

This...

Stuck on this...

Yes I mean stuck on Gunnar's head!!! His head wasn't all the way inside of it thank goodness, but it was kind of wedged into it so that I couldn't get it off for about 30 seconds and it really kind of freaked me out. And of course me freaking out freaked Ashton out, so he started bawling and saying over and over..."I was just playing with him, I was just playing with him!"

I was seriously picturing myself walking into the emergency room with this pumpkin bucket stuck on my baby's head!

Finally I kind of pryed his head out and he was of course still bawling, but not nearly as much as Ashton was. Gunnar calmed down after about a minute, but Ashton felt so bad he kept crying about it for a good half an hour. I think he thought he was in big trouble! He loves that pumpkin bucket and is always walking around with it on his own head, so I'm sure he thought it would be fun to see if it would actually fit onto Gunnar's smaller head. I truly know that Ashton wasn't trying to hurt him or anything, he was "just playing" like he said. Even with all of the acting out since Gunnar was born, he has always pretty much been nice to him and I know he wouldn't purposefully hurt him.

Of course I didn't stop to take a picture of the actual incident, so here is my lame attempt at re-enacting it...

The only mark that I can see that it left is this little welt by his right eye-the pumpkin was kind of wedged on there sideways. Anyway it doesn't show up too well in this picture. Luckily he survived...I told Lars about it and after finding out he was okay he laughed and said if this is the worse thing one of them ever does to the other than we are in good shape!

It's only a matter of time...

Gunnar is already constantly up on his hands and knees or tippy toes rocking back and forth...boo hoo, I can't believe how quickly it's happening this time. He doesn't even know how to sit up on his own yet and I think he'll be crawling in the next week or two!!! It is pretty darn cute though especially when it looks like he's doing little baby push ups! He also sits in the little high chair seat that we had for Ashton that attaches to our counter and he LOVES it. Give him a couple of measuring spoons and he's happy for a good 10-15 minutes. He still just stares down our food every time he sees us eat and is really reaching for our plates now too. So, so different than Ashton who never did that and who never fed himself a single thing till he was about 13 months old! And when we would try to put a cheerio or anything like that in his mouth he would gag and throw up! I rememer the first time he actually put food in his own mouth (it happened to be a little piece of enchilada) I cried! I was so excited to see him finally feed himself!

(here he is at Gunnar's age :)It was nice however that he never put anything else in his mouth for us to worry about him choking on. That will be hard with Gunnar to have to really pay attention! Especially now with all of Ashton's toys. We really need to be going through everything and putting away anything with little tiny pieces. I can see it in his eyes when he watches Ashton that he just can't wait to follow him around and play with him-it's so cute! He gets so excited and just stares and him and smiles all day.

This was so cute the other day...Gunnar was sitting up at the counter and Ashton came up and sat by him and shared his beloved "lovey" with him!Here's Gunnar sitting up more in his little tub too-Ashton was "helping" us bath him...(dumping water over his head) his hair is looking really red in this picture!