Halloween 2014

I haven't forgotten how to update this blog - honest.

It's finally autumn, although up until a couple of weeks ago you wouldn't have guessed that with how warm it's been. And in typical Utah fashion, we went from beautiful 70-degree weather to a few days with temps in the 50s, and then it's been 30 degrees if we're lucky for a few days. Go figure. But before the cold had time to set in we took advantage of being outside. Our neighbors had a humongous leaf pile and if we took our eyes off Mira for a second we would find her like this:

Mark, in the little bit of spare time that he has between classes, has been tinkering in the back yard. He started work on a tree house, and part of that included installing a zipline. Mira, being the daredevil that she is, thinks it's the coolest thing ever.

We also got to go to Mark's family's house to decorate pumpkins. Mira made sure I signed her name on her pumpkin and insisted that I add the 3. Can't forget that she's 3, ya know.

And of course, Halloween! Mira finally is old enough to get excited about this holiday. It was darn near impossible to keep her out of her costume until Halloween. Mark was hemming and hawing for weeks about whether or not he was actually going to get the yard fixed up this year and finally decided that he would. Here's a preliminary look.

We didn't end up running the fog machines or any of the animatronics this year (to be discussed in the next post) but we still had carloads of people come over just to see our yard and SO many people told us how much they love what we do. So I hope that was worth it for Mark.

My job, of course, was to take Mira trick-or-treating, and my mom came along for the event. I just threw an outfit together at the last second. I think I'm a goth jester or something. I thought it looked cool and Halloween-esque. Mira, like almost every other little girl under the age of 8, wanted to be one of the princesses from Frozen, although there were significantly fewer Annas than Elsas so at least she had that going for her.

Trick-or-treating went really well. Mira finally understood the concept and was so excited we could barely keep up with her as she ran house to house, rang the doorbell, and announced, "Trick-or-treat!" Then she would often try to strike up a conversation with the unsuspecting person who answered the door: "Me's Anna! Me three. What's you's name? Happy Halloween!"

We covered quite a lot of ground - enough that we wore out my mom, who left early. We kept going until Mira suddenly decided she was tired and she didn't want to go any farther, and I carried her home. Here's my tired girl with her haul.

It was a good Halloween!

This is out of order, but whatever. For Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur we went to my my sister's for dinner. Mira is unfortunately still in that in-between phase where she still refuses to nap or have anything resembling quiet time but still obviously needs the extra sleep - as evidenced by this:

All wiped out before the party even got started, which meant keeping her from having a meltdown after she woke up was even harder than usual, but at least with family around we can delay it.

I absolutely love these pictures of me and my sisters. We're a good-looking group, huh?

And we are all the legal drinking age... somehow in my head we're younger than that. Time keeps marching on, doesn't it?

I also love these pictures of my mom reading to Mira. Reading books is about the only thing that will get Mira to sit still for any length of time. Also, yes, her feet really are that big.

Here are a bunch of goofy pictures. Mira likes to take pictures of me and usually they're blurry/unflattering but a couple of these actually came out well. I can typically get a couple of decent smiles out of Mira for pictures and then she decides to get silly.

You can really see the resemblance here.

One night Mira fell asleep on the couch and somehow ended up in this position. It doesn't look comfortable but what do I know?

I think I need to start a separate blog dedicated just to Wally and the ridiculous places and positions I find him in.

"Thanks for clearing off this counter, I know you did it so I'd have another place to sit and observe my humans."

Any time there is a box, we know it's only a matter of time before Wally ends up in it.

The next post will be a bit gruesome, just to warn everyone. It involves Mark's hand and exploding hot oil. My sister summed up the experience of being Mark very well when she said, "For being one of the most careful and conscientious people I know, he sure is accident-prone!" He apparently is the big reason I went to nursing school - didn't know when I graduated that I'd be doing a lot of pro bono home health nursing care. But life is full of surprises, isn't it?