My name is Gwen and I am silly.

My name is Inez and I’m a gypsy for Halloween.

Now onto figuring out their shoes. I hate that part.

Post edit:
I apparently need to should give a shout out to Dave who cut the skull and cross bones out for me, and adhered it to the bag. Thanks for your help babe, YTB.

Anyway, the other night we went to a pumpkin patch. Even though we already have some pumpkins growing in our backyard, we wanted to have a pumpkin patch experience. This place even had a “petting zoo” where a few random animals were hanging out in cages, eager to bite little fingers that found their way through the fence. There was a llama, some goats, some donkeys and a wallaby. Yes, you read that right. A wallaby.

The best thing about the wallaby was that when it was closing time, the wallaby’s owner came to pick it up, and this wallaby rode shotgun back to it’s home. I’m not joking. In this car (some kind of four-door sedan) there was a little girl and a Great Dane in the back seat, the owner was driving, and the wallaby rode up front. I have to say it was one of the strangest and most awesome things I’ve ever seen.

There was a gorgeous sunset that evening too. I wasn’t able to capture it. There are still a lot of things I need to learn about photography!

But I finally finished her costume last night and I have to say, I’m pretty proud of myself. It’s not even October yet! Now I just need to find the right shoes.

And I should give a shout-out to my seam-ripper. I don’t know what I’d do without it.

One costume down, one to go.

So Inez was a witch. A nice witch though and she was always careful that everyone knew that. I mean, it was pink and black. How could a mean witch wear pink?

Inez tried her best to keep Gwen on the step so that I could get a picture of the two of them.

She is going, going…

gone. No one can hold back our little punkin. Or put our baby in a corner.

Here’s our walk with eleven jack-o-lanterns (I carved the last two that afternoon). This is what it looked like through a mask or if you were running up to the door.

Inez with her loot.

Beyond excitement over a hard strawberry candy with some sort of juicy filling. I don’t get it.

Our evening consisted of attending our ward’s trunk-or-treat, and then driving down for a quick visit with the in-laws. On our way home we decided to hit a row of houses because I wanted her to experience going door to door (very different than going trunk to trunk). It was fun, but cold. At one house she was upset when she came back to me at the end of the driveway because some man said she was going to “freeze to death” and she didn’t want to die. If you know our girl, you know that she is very dramatic and takes things literally. The other day when it was taking her FOR.EVER. to form a sentence I told her to just “spit it out.” Disaster. Any progress in our conversation became completely unraveled.

Back to Halloween. She was so upset at the thought of death from freezing, that I went back to the door and let that old man have a piece of my mind. It went something kind of like this:

Me: Hey old man! Why don’t you just hand the candy out to the kids and hold back on your suttle criticism about my parenting!? So what if my child is without a jacket on Halloween? What’s the point of wearing a jacket if it just covers up your costume?

OldMan: Um, did you grow up in a warm climate?

Me: Yes, California.

OldMan: Well why don’t you just go back! We don’t need you snotty Californians here clogging up our highways and driving the housing prices up! In fact, why don’t you just go trick-or-treating back in California? Leave your jackets here in Utah and don’t let the state line hit you on your way out!

Me: Oooooh!!!! Reeses peanut butter cups! Can I have one?

And scene.

Okay, so maybe some of that didn’t happen. But I think I should be a writer for a soap opera, don’t you? Maybe I can even get a job since the writers are on strike. That is still happening, right? Please end soon, for our sakes, because 30 Rock must go on.

I guess in the meantime I won’t quit my day job which consists of bundling up my children in the 30 degree weather (to avoid more loaded remarks made by the elderly) and making Christmas skirts for them (my children, not the elderly).

It doesn’t pay great (my day job or the elderly I suspect). Well it doesn’t pay at all, but there are always perks like eating Reeses peanut butter cups from their Halloween stash (my children, not the elderly).

Before the pumpkin slaughter

Jon is hard at work

Dave’s first

Dave’s second

Jon’s first

Jon’s second

Ashley’s

Here’s one of the three that I did. The other two are not really photo worthy because every year I feel this pressure to produce a really good Jack-o-lantern (which is totally self-imposed). I get this way because year after year Dave just sneezes and has the best looking jack-o-lanterns. But me? Well, I fret for a long, long time about what to do. After feeling bad for wasting so much time (because everyone else has already carved at least one pumpkin already) I just start carving without a plan. It gets worse as I just keep carving and cutting and cutting and carving, trying to improve what I’ve already basically destroyed. And the result is horrendous and I end feeling sorry for myself and lack of spontaneous creativity. Oh well. Maybe next year I’ll make a good one.

Anyway, enough about the fact that the stem can make or break a great pumpkin. We really enjoyed our time at our little patch.

Inez was so sad/overly dramatic that we had to leave because she wanted to play “Ghosts in the Graveyard” in the kiddie maze with some other kids that were there.

But then she got happy when she discovered that she could be the queen of the haybale mountain

Trying to balance and not topple over, pumpkins and all.

We have ten pumpkins. But don’t tell Dave because he’ll be muttering non-obscene obscenities about me under his breath while we are carving them all.
(But just look at those great stems!)