Halloween festivities
Now that the stores all have Christmas stuff up, Halloween seems like old news, but we had a fun week leading up to the holiday.
Our “creepy crawler” at her daycare’s pumpkin carving night
The Wednesday before, Hazel’s school had an evening event where they had food and invited everyone to come and carve their pumpkins. Hazel was the youngest one there, and certainly wasn’t able to carve a pumpkin, but she enjoyed seeing all the other kids. I carved a silly pumpkin, which to the disappointment of the little 3-year old girl at the table with us, didn’t look exactly like hers. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seemed to love cooked pumpkin, Hazel gladly munched away on the top of the raw pumpkin as I carved.
Who needs candy when you’ve got a raw pumpkin?
Then a couple days later, we did some more pumpkin carving with our neighborhood friends and their daughter.
Pumpkin carving, take two
This time, the pumpkins were set out on a big plastic tarp, so Hazel was actually able to get more engaged. She loved pulling the pumpkin guts out and then putting them back in!
Ready to dig in, again (she was a mess by the end!)
We enjoyed a delicious buttermilk bundt cake with a lovely spiced ginger icing, and turned out a nice lot of pumpkins.
A great new favorite fall bundt cake with lovely flecks of butternut squash throughout
A funny assortment of pumpkins, including our wicked witch
With all our pumkins carved, it was time to get to work on a costume for Hazel’s first Halloween. Since she’s crawling now, I wanted to make sure that it was something she could move around in. So I modified a dino sleeper so she had little stegosaurus spikes along her back.
Our little dino
We got her costume ready just in time to participate in the 3rd annual Freaky Four Miler at Bull City Running. There were lots of great costumes, including a “Nun on the Run” and Magnum PI. Hazel tried to escape the group photo, but we’re there down front.
Freaky Four Miler group shot
It was a lovely day for a run, and I was glad to get out for a speedy 4 mile run before looping back to meet Dan and Hazel. My favorite part about this fun run is seeing all the people out on the trail that don’t know about the race and unexpectedly see Wonder Woman running by!
Our little dinosaur trying to escape to cross the finish line on her own
On actual Halloween day, the daycare organized a parade for all the kids to show off their costumes. Once kids are old enough to have a say in what their costume is, Spiderman seems to be a popular choice, but in the Koala room, I thought there was a wonderfully cute diversity of costumes.
The cutest classroom in the daycare Halloween parade (no, we’re not biased!)
Hazel might not have been the scariest dinosaur, but she was pretty adorable, especially when she was crawling around in costume.
Happy Halloween!
We finished the day at our friend Sean’s place, and we were thrilled that Hazel successfully went to sleep in her carseat while we there and seamlessly transitioned to her crib once we got home from the festivities (the first time we’ve tried to do this).
It was a pretty busy week, and just the beginning of all the celebrations to come before the end of the year.
You can check out more photos from our October adventures on Dan’s Flickr set.
