Soccer & Tacos & Monkey Bread!

After spending the last weekend away from home, this weekend was all kinds of home-based fun.

But before we can get to the weekend, we have to survive the week… Specifically the poor choices I make when booking doctors appointments at the Med Center in the morning.

It was also, quite possibly, the longest doctors appointment we have had in a long time. It wasn’t that intensive, but they did ask a ton of questions. Natalie handled the long time in a small room way better than I expected.

Though the fact that her nanny packed a banana for a snack makes me think she is secretly mad at me…?

Working from home sometimes means that I need some away time from the house at the end of the day. Luckily, my kids were up for an ice cream outing!

Our new favorite ice cream place, Howdy, has great ice cream, great decor, and tries to hire individuals with disabilities. Winning in so many ways! (Ice cream really does solve everything!)

last time we went, Natalie barely touched her ice cream. She loves ice cream, so my only thought is that the cool balloons are too distracting. One of the ice cream cone balloons fell off (before we got there) and she could not stop trying to steal it…!

Also I think my new favorite ice cream flavor is cookie monster - this is the second place I’ve had it and I love it!

Thomas had his first real soccer game in the league! He’s played mini games back when we were in Alaska, but these are real games against different soccer organizations. His team did awesome!

We decided to brave the traffic (yes, even on a Saturday!) and run a few errands near the Med Center (ironic, I know…). One of our favorite places to eat in the area is 100% Taquito. It is decorated to look like a taco truck on a busy street in Mexico on a normal day, but gets even more exciting closer to Halloween!

Henry and Natalie were most excited about the giant pink skeleton (did you see the unicorn skeleton near his feet?), but Thomas was most excited about the Star Wars skeletons in the green volkswagon bug. But he was very adamant that there should not be two Darth Vader‘s!

I didn’t think Natalie would eat much of the street tacos, but hoped she might enjoy the quesadillas. She definitely enjoyed making a cheese bridge, but only ate part of one quesadilla. Luckily, the rest of us got to split them because they were delicious!

We spent a lot of time at Whole Earth Provision Co. because Matt needed some supplies for his upcoming motorcycle trip. But the kids and I were most excited about the fun toys and books. Natalie was insistent on buying the worlds tiniest paint brush set…

Unfortunately, the worlds tiniest paintbrush set might also be the worlds worst! She quickly gave up on the tiniest and moved over to a full 36 color set!

Henry has been wanting to make monkey bread from scratch for what seems like months, but I keep forgetting. He managed to ask in enough time to make it for a dessert after dinner, so we got baking!
I say we, but he really is doing most of the work these days! The dough recipe is a pizza crust base, then you let it rise cut it into a bunch of tiny pieces, roll them up and dip them in butter and cinnamon sugar. Then let it rise again!

Henry diligently mixed up the glaze and got busy icing the warm monkey bread. You can see his concentration on getting the icing just right. ;)

Look at how proud he is of his monkey bread from scratch. He deserves to be proud, it was super good!

Camping at Stephen F Austin SP

The pop-up has been patiently sitting in the garage waiting for the next time we pull it out and go camping. Somehow I was convinced that September would be cool enough and booked us a weekend away at Stephen F Austin State Park - we went there in peak pandemic when camping was banned, but day visits were allowed. It seemed like a fun, but close weekend to dust off the pop-up!

Spent most of the day getting things ready, so as soon as we picked up the kids from school - we were ready to hit the road! They look pretty pumped, don’t they??

We got camp set-up a little easier than the last two times and had some burgers before bed. And like the last few trips - Natalie was ready to get busy as soon as the sun came up. “It’s morning, mommy!!!”

Since Natalie and I were headed off to the bathroom, the boys joined us for the walk over. And don’t be fooled into thinking Henry is so on top of things he already changed out of his pj’s - he never changed into them last night…!

After breakfast, we decided to hike some of the trails before it got too hot outside. There was a rough start when the littlest one was demanding to be carried, but luckily I got away with carrying her for just a few minutes - then she wanted to walk like her big brothers!

Thomas mapped out our hiking paths last night on the trail map. Last night, we discovered the trail map on paper didn’t match the trail head map, so Thomas sketched in the missing trails. He then drew out which way he wanted to go and added up the distance of all the different segments. He was such a good navigator!

This was the fishing access point that was missing on the paper map - and quite a nice view of the Brazon!

Look at this sweet little angel! You wouldn’t believe me on the ever-loving fit she was throwing just 10 minutes before when she wanted to be carried…

This is the overlook we made it to on our last visit. It looks about the same, though the river wasn’t as brown as last time - torrential rains didn’t precede this visit!

You may also notice that Carter joined us this time - it’s her first camping trip! She loved hiking around with us and absolutely loved hanging out at our campsite. She even spotted a deer crossing through our site this morning and didn’t freak out.

The kids were not impressed with the playground close to our spot, but they had a blast riding their bikes around the path in front of our campsite. Natalie is doing so awesome on her pedal bike, but I am doing less awesome on the fact she needs a new helmet. New priority to find one that works with her two BAHAs now that we are back to riding in the cool(er?) weather!

Overall, a good dust-off trip for the pop-up and I really like the big spots at this park. Will definitely be our close-to-home favorite!

Canal House

We struck out on crabbing the other day when Nonni & Grandpa were in town, so I decided to book a house with crabbing & fishing literally in the back yard!
Unfortunately, we had a sick 3 year old this past week and it took forever to get her a Covid test to make sure it was just a cold. But Nonni & Grandpa had decided to skip this one just to be safe. (We were bummed and now I owe my mom a new birthday present/trip!)

The best part about this house was the dock in the back that was right on the canal and covered with awesome shade from two big trees. And the comfy chairs to sit in didn’t hurt either…

The house also came with all these crab pots - all you had to do was put bait in and drop into the canal! We were super excited to try out this low effort way of catching crabs.

I was really surprised how excited all three of the kids were to try fishing. One of our friends gave us a good set up for saltwater/canal fishing, but we caught absolutely nothing…. The kids did not seem to care!

I think Matt was most excited to get to try out his inflatable boat. We bought this shortly after we moved back to Houston in the first hurricane season – our flooded street escape vehicle. The canal was calm enough that it was fun to toot around in the inflatable boat.

The house also had a green light set up for night fishing, which is supposed to bring in the big fish! We still caught nothing but it sure looks cool! The one thing you did attract were about 1 million tiny crabs - they look super creepy skittering around under the surface.

Matt did not get enough boating time on the first day, so he took all of us out again. Apparently it’s much easier to row when he’s by himself…

The crab pots did an awesome job! We got some really big guys and enough to feed all of us. Though we need to find a better method for picking them up, these guys would not let go of my tongs!

Every time we’ve caught crab for the beach house, they’ve been turned into stuffed crabs. But we decided to try something new and grill the crabs! Which meant a bit of a learning curve for dispatching the crabs without boiling them and then prepping them for the grill.

But it was totally worth the extra effort! The only downside was that the boys loved the crab cooked this way, so now we had to share… :(

Someone looked a little rough when they got up this morning… Despite appearances - she slept great!

We were running low on chicken necks the last night, but threw the traps in anyways over night. We thought we might have enough crabs to take home for another meal.

But there was only one monster in there and he apparently decided to eat his brother once the chicken neck was gone. We read that was a danger with traps, but only after a few days. This guy went cannibal fast!!

Lucky for him, he got to go free since one monster isn’t enough to share. Try not to be so heartless next time, big guy…!

Texas City Dike Crabbing

I was trying to get my mom to come down for a weekend to help out while Matt was out of town. Our communications about the plan miserably failed and she (and Grandpa!) ended up coming the weekend before Matt was leaving.

Oops!

I was clearly unprepared, so I had to run to the grocery store for supplies. Henry had been asking to make a cake, so I picked up a single layer cake kit for him while I was there. He had fun making it all by himself, but there were complaints about the cake being too small…

Grandpa was apparently very jealous of Nonni’s stories of crabbing with us in Galveston last month. He had mentioned he would like to try to go crabbing next time he was in town. Which is suddenly now! ;)
In trying to avoid the 2 hour drive to Bolivar, I scoped us out a new site on the Texas City Dike.

We had chairs and we had nets and we even had chicken wings for the nets. But we didn’t have much shade…

We had amazing luck catching crabs!

Well… That’s if you count hermit crabs…

We struggled to catch any blue crabs, but at one point my net came up with at least 10 hermit crabs!

Grandpa was dedicated to the crabs! He tried putting his net down in various locations, but to no avail.

We also managed to lose several nets - I think we need a better system for the kids to hold onto the string. Also I think tying the end of the strings onto a cut pool noodle is going to be a game changer. I saw someone do it on a crabbing Facebook group and I think it would have saved at least one of the nets if we had been able to grab a floating string.

We did manage to catch one big dude, but ended up giving him away… We didn’t figure we could split him seven ways for dinner!

But the day was saved with an awesome lunch at a tiny restaurant on the marina. They might have had the best fried mushrooms I’ve ever had in my life. I definitely ate more than my fare share!

And since there was so much grumbling about the chocolate cake being too small, I helped the boys make another one for after dinner tonight. I can neither confirm nor deny that the boys were eating the extra icing. Evidence clearly points in one direction though…

Sorry the crabbing was so terrible and I’m not great at communicating, dear parents. It was great to see you anyhow and we’ll catch them all next time!

Happy 9th Birthday, Thomas!

Look who is now 9 years old! So excited to celebrate your birthday, my awesome oldest son! :)

We were all playing with kinetic sand after breakfast and Thomas made himself a birthday cake with a candle. I guess I was taking too long to finish his real one??

So everyone decided to make birthday cakes!

Even the little one made a pretty good one!

But for the real cake, Thomas requested a space cake. I had this brilliant idea to make a black cake and shove pops in the cake to represent the planets (Pluto obviously included). I thought making them out of rice krispie treats instead of cake pops would make them lighter, but they were still incredibly heavy. But I loved the way they looked, so we were committed to making it work.

Thomas, on the other hand, didn’t understand why I failed to include the moon… The moon is in the details at this point, son! ;)

Driving to the party and I put Henry in charge of making sure the planets made it there safely. I was pretty sure sticking them in the cake ahead of time was not going to end well, so we had a cake pop holder to keep them safe until the last possible second for adding them!

Ok, enough about the cake - on to party time! Thomas wanted to have it at this cool lab themed place down the street that we’ve used several times for summer camp weeks. He got to pick the theme of the party and chose Robotic drag racers! Thomas also chose to work with his brother even though all his school buds were there. :)

Natalie was less interested in the Legos, but helped me decorate the party room!

I love that the kids who live in Alaska for several years chose to use skis in the front of their dragster! Though it didn't do too well on the little bump in the track…

Slime time! Birthday boy gets the lab coat and to do all the hard work of slime making. Thomas has been to here so many times that he surely has the process memorized and seems to be making sure “his assistant” doesn’t forget anything… ;)

Everything was going great in my mind until this point on the slime making - why did he chose to add so much glitter...?? Sorry in advance to the other parents who didn’t want their kids to be covered in glitter…

Natalie was most excited about shooting this air canon full of smoke at all the other birthday guests. I got hit with air shots a few time and even as an adult it’s hilarious. :)

The put together space cake! It held on to the planets long enough for photos and singing!

Look at that cutie! Such a big guy these days and can't believe he's 9!

And good ole Texas barbecue for dinner with the special red birthday plate! Happy birthday to you, little man - we love you too the Moon and back!

Even though there was no moon on your cake ;)

Can You Crab in December?

We’ve all gotten bitten by the crabbing bug, so we thought we would take off over the holidays and see if we could catch any crabs down in our usual spot.

Our usual pier is getting a bit beat up by the weather, but we were able to work around the missing planks ok. Luckily Theresa warned us that it was damaged, so we left the 2 year old safely home with the nanny for the day.

You can see Henry was taking advantage of the missing planks to have a footrest while crabbing - this boy knows how to get comfy. ;)

The biggest upside to crabbing in December was that the weather was awesome! Usually we are all dying of heat within the first 30 minutes of July, but we hung out for awhile with no threat of sweating to death.

Unfortunately, we caught almost nothing. This was the only guy we caught who was legal and one 1 of like 4 crabs total.

But all this talk about crabs really had me craving some seafood. So the lonely legal crab got thrown back in to catch another day and we headed down to the ferry over to Galveston!

So my answer is that maybe you can crab in December…? But not if you want enough seafood for a full meal? ;)

Highly recommend the time spent with the family though and our usual seafood spot in Galveston is never a disappointment!

Canton and Carter

We’re all getting a little braver these days, since it seems like Covid isn’t exactly seeing itself to the door and we miss seeing everyone. So I did the bravest (riskiest?) thing so far this year and decided to join Theresa and family for the annual Canton trip!

Ok, I am not totally insane, I took my best mask along with me. The shopping Arbors might “technically” be outside, but they aren’t quite as air circulating as a wide open field…

It sure was nice to get to the real outdoors and take the mask off though. It’s the most restrictive one I bought for airflow, so it gets pretty tiring to wear it for a long time!

Also I lost my sunglasses at some point and Theresa loaned me hers. One of us can live without their sunglasses, but I definitely can’t!

I was so excited to see that there was a booth here that sold the personalized ornaments like I used to buy in Alaska all the time. Plus it has cookies!

Such a good best friend to let me keep her shades even when I also demand she take a photo with me staring straight into the sun!

Theres’a’s husband, Josh, was along for this Canton trip and wooed us back to the campground from all the shopping by making us this campground wine & cheese plate. :)

It was definitely a successful ploy on his part. Even if the only “wineglasses” he had were styrofoam cups… lol

But Canton was not the only stop on the agenda!

Purtis Creek state park - where we stay while visiting Canton, happens to be right down the road from Straydog shelters. Straydog was where we adopted our first dog ages ago - a black lab named Natalie. (You can probably guess how much we loved her!)

Anyhow, I had seen they had new puppies and was hoping to find one that would love us and bring home to fill the dog hole in the house. But those puppies wanted absolutely NOTHING to do with me!

But…

They did have these new black lab sisters that they just got and hadn’t even been added to the dog list on their website….

And you can guess what happened when I locked eyes with these sweet brown, Labrador eyes…

Meet Carter - named for Samantha Carter on SG1. As far as they know, she was a stray for the first 8 months of her life and isn’t at all sure why she is on a leash and being taken away with this new lady.

When I got her home, she immediately melted into the grass and wouldn’t even consider walking on the leash to the house. So I carried her in to introduce her to the rest of the family.

All the excitement definitely took it out of Carter and she needed a long nap to recover. Natalie can appreciate a good cat nap, so she was ok with dogs needing naps too.

Carter, we know it’s a big change, but we promise you are going to love it here!

Thanksgiving Road Trip

Since our last camping trip went pretty well, I thought we should try it again for Thanksgiving break.

These kids are at the point where they don’t seem to mind road trips all that much, so it really opens up further possibilities! I really wanted to book our old favorite in Arkansas, Ouachita State Park, but the cabins were all booked up. But there was another state park in Arkansas that had open cabins, so we decided to try something new. Off to Moro Bay State Park we went!

Also my friend got this extra Katz hat for me since I introduced him to their awesome coffee. But Henry decided he liked it more than I did and stole it. He doesn’t even drink coffee… :(

All these electronic devices might be why they travel so well these days… Also I was smart enough to break the trip up a little and we stayed at a hotel the first night to check out Nacogdoches, TX.

Someone is ready to get out and explore! She loves to put these sunglasses for photos, but they don’t stay on long once we are outside. Looks pretty adorable though, doesn’t she??

We were riding bikes trails around in one of the city parks when Matt had a blow-out on one of his tires. We weren’t very close to the truck, so he told us he would walk back and to just keep going without him. We aren’t the most loving family, because I don’t think we even hesitated to leave him - lol.

But we did stop at all the cool things we saw and sent him photos. So he could live vicariously though the images? ;)

Henry insisted we stop at the bridge where Matt’s tire blew out on the way back to the truck. He just wanted to send his dad one more photo of the “crime scene”.

Finally made it to the cabin and the kids were delighted to discover there was wi-fi at this cabin. Definitely their new favorite “roughing it” location.

Ok, I can’t judge too much - the cabin also had cable. Which is how Thomas and I discovered our new favorite show to watch was about aviation disasters.

And morning cartoons! I promise we did leave the cabin to experience the great outdoors, but we really did love the upgrade from the empty box cabin we had at Martin Dies.

Plus it was super cool looking with the elevated view of the lake.

Finally out of the cabin and enjoying the awesome weather!

Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve been ordering almost all of our groceries online - even when trying to buy in bulk from places like Costco. Above you can see, the giant box of applesauce we ordered.

Confused?

So was I when I opened the delivery box and they had sent us a giant Jenga set instead… But there’s no reason not to play with it when the whims of the grocery gremlins send it your way? ;)

This was the first time we had actually played with it and everyone was concentrating on winning!

It started to get so wobbly at the end! Thomas ended up being the one to finally knock it down, but at that point it could have been a strong breeze that took it out. Definitely a fun upgrade to normal sized Jenga!

Currently there is a bridge across the Ouachita River, but these ferries were in service off and on from the early 1800’s to 1992! Since it’s fairly recent that it went out of service, all the the “Wait here for Ferry” signs are still posted in the park.

Hiking time! As most kids do when hiking, Henry found himself a nice hiking stick.

Natalie, on the other hand, found a cat. This girl loooooooves cats and saw this guy in the park before we went hiking. And this cat must love Natalie because he followed us from a close distance the whole time we were hiking!

Natalie was up and ready for action while the boys were still being sleepy bums this morning. She the two of us ate breakfast and walked down to the park store. She got a park T-shirt and picked out some small toys for her brothers. You have to go with mom to get the best souvenirs. ;)

Back on the road! We were headed to see both sets of grandparents since neither one of them has gotten nearly enough grandkid time this year. And even though things are getting better, not every place is fully open to people - thus the Chicken Express being eaten in the truck.

But I can’t blame 2020 weirdness for Henry’s expression, he’s been weird since 2014. ;)

Grannie had this ribbon toy and the boys had so much fun running around the yard twirling it! They were competing to see who could get the best circle - because with sibling, everything is a competition!

I am not going to pick a winner on circle making, but if I were forced into picking my favorite photo - this one of Thomas cracks me up! He was trying so hard to make it look like this was effortless, but didn’t quite nail that look. ;)

Made it over to my parent’s house and they immediately put the kids to work!

There were some complaints from the little kids about how hard it was to dig the holes to plant Nonni’s flowers, so my dad stepped in to make it a little easier. ;)

Mom was showing me all the plants they had growing this year and we discovered that Natalie loves eating tomatoes off the plants. She left the big ones alone, but none of the little red tomatoes were safe!

She was then convinced she was big and strong enough to ride the Green Machine on her own. Not quite, my little warrior…

It’s not like she is deprived, you can see we brought her other two bikes along on the trip!

She finally gave up on the Green Machine and rode all over the place with her balance bike. She definitely still prefers it over her new pedal bike. She’s just so fast on this one without pedals that she’s not patient enough to learn how to go equally as fast on the pink one.

But don’t worry, she still got some Green Machine fun with her brother! I honestly didn’t think Henry volunteering to ride her around would go over so well, but you can see she was having a blast riding with him, despite maybe being a little smushed in there.

It was a great week away from work/school and so nice to spend time outdoors and with family. Hope everyone else had a great Thanksgiving break as well!

November Random

November was pretty full of fun, but it was mostly all in the “random” bucket. Which if you know me, is my favorite kind! We did have a pretty awesome trip for Thanksgiving weekend, so that will get it’s own post, but here is the other fun stuff!

We had a few leftover donuts from our Halloween assortment, but not enough for everyone. So to keep Natalie from getting upset about not getting a donut, I made her the most exciting waffle & fruit plate I could. I bet you can tell that she approved!

We have been doing her deaf education therapy virtually since March and the are finally letting the therapists go back to visit in person. But there are lots of rules for their safety as you can see. Amy was pretty chill about the whole thing and was aware that 2 year olds may breech the barrier… ;)

Natalie was just so excited to see her favorite therapist in real life again!

I know I have probably said it a million times, but I love her hairstyles the day after her nanny braids her hair. I also love her expressions - she is full of so many great ones!

Thomas got invited to a birthday party and to keep Henry from feeling left out, I planned an outing to a mini-golf course in the area. It’s in one of the parks and totally free. They just aren’t renting out clubs right now thanks to Covid - so I bought the only kid option at Target to play with. It was apparently not a putter, but this kid still managed to get several holes in one!

And we checked out a new ice cream place - which makes Thai rolled ice cream! You can’t really tell it’s rolled cylinders of ice cream given all the toppings we put on it, but it was and Henry approved. :)

I may have bought the ingredients to make mummy dogs and totally forgotten them. Oh well, mummy dogs can be a thing in November as well, right??

We’ve just about worn through our sidewalk chalk collection with all the time spent trying to be out of the house, but safely “at home” this year. She loves all of my terrible drawings and hopefully we can restock our chalk soon. It seems like it’s been sold out almost all year!

Happy Microtia Awareness Day y’all! Her shirt was a little too big, but the fit goes well with the 80’s hair, right??

She certainly loved the pink color! There were obviously no picnics this year, but we celebrated her awesomeness on our own. :)

This may look like a fun time, but this was testing! She is going to be 3 in a few months, so she had to go through the full assessment for whether she qualified for the preschool intervention services. I mean, she had a blast doing all of the different activities while I had to wait down the hall.

Overall they think she is amazing and so smart, but her hearing loss and speech skills definitely qualify her for the districts Hard of Hearing preschool program.

It’s so weird - I have been wanting her to be able to go to the preschool to be around other kids like herself since I heard about it. But at the same time, I was still getting upset hearing about all of the areas they assessed her as lacking. Being a parent is challenging…

We had a visit to the imaging department and the staff there thought that she did so good, they brought her this ridiculously pink make-up set. Needless to say she was excited as could be - especially when she hit the button that made it play music!

And look who is enjoying their new “big girl” bike! If you were very observant, you might notice it’s got the training wheels back on. She wasn’t quite ready to try this big of a bike without some emotional support…

Flu shot time! Can’t you tell it’s their favorite???

They at least love it for the ice cream at the end!

This one didn’t get a shot today, but she still got some ice cream. ;)

We were working in the yard the other day and I noticed that while my mini-me was decked out in her usual bright color palette, I was the exact opposite in my color scheme. It cracked me up and she was happy as always to take a photo with her momma. :)

Not seen in this picture is the fact my shoes are also gray & black - what can I say, sometimes I like to avoid colors. ;)

Happy Halloween!

We had a lot to cram in in the few days before Halloween, but we were ready to have some Halloween fun!

My little helper with more interested in eating the flour off my rolling mat then actually helping me roll out the cookies. Why do kids like to eat flour, it’s really not good…

Thank you past Jen! You guys have no idea how many times I have made this mistake before I got smart enough to write it on the can.

The boys absolutely love decorating Halloween cookies! Though it feels like their sugar usage is creeping up…

Good thing I have enough sprinkles to last us approximately a couple of years, so they can go crazy!

Natalie still doesn’t seem very interested in decorating the cookies, but she sure does love eating the sprinkles!

“He’s tasted absolutely good Yashin start over no no no no no no no ha ha Ha ha ha”

I’ve been using voice to text to do some of these captions and Henry wanted to try to caption this photo. That was his result - lol. I'm going to let him try again:

”The boys like the cookies and so did Natalie and they also like decorating them and also eating them is the best part!”

(Close enough!)

My mini-me!!! She doesn’t seem to love her jeans as much as I love mine, but she looks so adorable in them! Also adorable is the fact she’s been carrying around a purse I've had since I was a little kid.

Krispy Kreme has been advertising their Halloween dozen donuts, so we decided to go get some. Unfortunately for us, we went on a day where it was “buy one dozen donuts - get a dozen glazed donuts for $1”. this may sound like the opposite of a problem, but because no one is venturing indoors these days, the drive-through line took for ever!

We didn’t even need two dozen donuts, but after sitting there for so long we were definitely going to buy them. In the end, we decided to swap in some of the fun donuts and take them to our friends house. I ran them to the door, hit the doorbell and drove off! :)

I think Natalie liked her doughnut… Don’t you?!?

This is an odd one for Halloween, but Thomas had an optometrist appointment to check his eyes. And when I tried to find a specialist of myopia, one of the recommended practices was in the 99 Ranch grocery store. Odd location, but good optometrist!

All dressed up and ready to get some candy! This year didn’t require purchasing any new costumes, sometimes it’s awesome to have such wide selection already. ;)

Thomas was my superhero - Ant-man!

Henry was a sneaky ninja (in crocs)!

And Natalie was an adorable penguin, who kept checking the level of candy in her bucket!

Of course, we are still in a pandemic so I didn’t think it was wise to go door to door trick-or-treating. So instead, we went Easter egg style and I hid candy all over the yard for them to find. They actually seemed quite excited for this new method!

I guess it doesn’t matter how you got the candy, as long as you got lots of it!

I’m not gonna lie, this penguin costume is still one of my favorites! I’m going to be so sad when the youngest finally outgrows it. :(

And this is completely unrelated to Halloween, but we finally upgraded Natalie to a pedal bike. She’s not too sure about the peddling, but she sure does love the color!