Where did November go?

I know, I know, it has been a whole month since my last posts but November seems to have gotten away from me. What have we been doing? All sorts of random things.

My former boss with whom I loved working for decided to retire; my neighbor watched Harrison so I could have an afternoon off to attend the party and go out to dinner with  a friend.

We decided to make the laundry room more user friendly for mom. This small project of adding a counter and changing out the facet turned into a major remodel of demoing the closet, adding lower and upper cabinets, adding two counters, new vinyl flooring and a new sink basin with a restaurant style super sprayer for getting out all the crud that kids and babies grind into their clothes. Granted we hired someone to do the work, but Harrison and mom had to clean out the laundry room, go to home stores etc. It will be done next week and then I will post some pictures for you to drool over.

One evening we had dinner at Grandmama and Zaidy's house and before we arrived, they sent us a text that Zaidy had just raked a giant pile of leaves sand saved them for Harrison to jump in. It was dark when we got there so we moved the cars and shined headlights on the lawn to watch the fun. It was cold and wet, but a LOT of fun was had.

Knowing that we would be spending a week in Las Vegas over Thanksgiving, I also did a bit of shopping and sewing so that I could have Christmas gifts ready to give to my family. Our niece, Argenta, is almost two years old and I thought she would like to play some felt food. I meant to take a nice photo of the entire food supply but instead I only took one phone photo of 25% of it instead. Bread, grape jelly, cheese, ham, lettuce, ravioli, watermelon, tomato and cucumber.

I have always fancied myself a barely-capable seamstress, often jamming the machine and sewing crooked straight lines. Well, I finally forced myself to learn how to use my fancy new embroidering sewing machine and int turns out, I am a better sewer than I thought, my old machine was just terrible! Now we are BFF's.

In the mood for DIY projects, I also made a bunch of hair clips for Argenta and some button-embellished bobby pins using mainlymy supply of spare buttons I've collected in a jar for 12 years (I'm growing my bangs out and need to hold those long suckers out of my eyes).

Hopefully you will accept all of this as an excuse for my lack of blogging. Next post will include our annual family trip to Las Vegas.

Spooky Halloween Fun!

"Spooky" has been my catchall term this Halloween whenever we see something that Harrison might deem as scary. I didn't really explain the meaning to him but I am pretty sure that he understands spooky to mean a little creepy but all in good fun. Giant spider hanging above a door tangled in cobwebs? Spooky! Wicked Witch guarding a doorway? Spooky!

Halloween night we walked down the street to meet up with Amelie and Morgan so the three two-year-olds could trick-or-treat together. As toddlers, no one had really spooky costumes. Harrison was Simba, The Lion King (insert ROAR here), Amelie was Cinderella and Morgan was a ghost; everyone was too cute. We left the house at 6pm just before dusk to keep things light for the kiddos.

The very first house they went to, which also has young children living there, had an animatronic ghoulish skeleton guarding the door. It was only maybe 18" wide and 9" tall but it has an evil laugh, blinking lights and arms and head that wiggled about. Evidently it has a motion sensor so when the kids approached it went off and poor Morgan screamed and cried in terror while Amelie and Harrison backed away quick in alarm:

According to this photo Harrison decided to give it another look! After that fright, things calmed down a bit and the kids were enjoying the candy falling into their buckets. Then the bigger kids started prowling the streets. At one point, a boy of about eight walked away from a house as we were walking up and he was dressed as the scary killer ghost from the movie Scream and Harrison did NOT want to walk past that kid.

He was scared enough that the other little boy's mother had to ask her son to lift up his mask so Harrison could see his face and sure enough there was a tow headed boy smiling back. Spooky indeed!

Luckily the only other spooky thing they encountered was the fog machine on the return trip to Amelie's house. The kids loved playing in the fog and it was hard to get them to leave.

At this age, once around the neighborhood was plenty fun (about an hour) so we went home for some dinner. Every time the doorbell rang, Harrison would jump up from the table with a parent and run to to the front hall, pick up the candy dish, insist on opening the door himself and then (after a bout with some kids that grabbed lots of candy from his bowl), he would pick one candy bar and deposit it into each bucket, one by one, in a very responsible fashion.

 My Little Lion Man. I called him this to which he replied.

"No, I'm Simba! What's a Lion Man?"

 Adorable from the back!

 At our house, taking a candy from the bowl we left out

Harrison showing off his loot

Gavin also joined the group in his little blue monster costume. When I rehashed the night with Harrison the next morning, Harrison said that he and Gavin had to both ROAR since that's what lions and monsters do.