October

October marks the beginning of the best holidays, and there's just something in the air once the Fall season arrives that screams comfort. Family gatherings, pumpkin carving, costumes, sweatshirts, boots, the changing colors of the trees...oh, I could go on and on about my favorite things of Fall! October 2016 was a fantastic time for us so I dedicated one giant blog post for some of my favorite moments to remember.

For some reason, Barrett has always had a special connection with Halloween themed things. I have always had certain books out that we read around each holiday, but his Halloween books are year round favorites. In fact, on his fourth birthday I told him to pick out his very favorite books for me to read him and he picked all Halloween books. He loves Jack-o-lanterns, skeletons, ghosts, and a new recent favorite is zombies. I introduced him to the movie Paranorman (the movie Steven and I saw in theaters the night before Barrett was born) and he's obsessed. For fun, we made October 1st a little celebration. Barrett wanted to wear his skeleton pajamas and new jack-o-lantern beanie for the occasion, so this was his look all day. I made some amazing cheddar ranch potatoes and we watched Nightmare Before Christmas while dancing around the house.

Zoey turned eight months old on October 2nd. I took her monthly pictures, but she was tired and recovering from her awful stomach virus. September was unkind to our family and Zoey's expressions are pretty much how we all felt. So. Little. Sleep. 

Fast forward a week, Zoey is all better and we are ready for FUN! We celebrated Steven's birthday in true Steven fashion by starting out our night playing games at Dave n Busters. We had a blast just the two of us! This was our first date in a long time and we definitely soaked it up! I broke the record on one of the games and then kept beating my own high score, so we racked up a ton of points and got Barrett a Pokemon character stuffed animal. It kind of made our night :) We went to Mi Dia From Scratch and had so much fun we missed our movie. We decided to live it up and go downtown to a winery to wait for the next showing. We saw The Accountant and it was hands down the best movie I've seen in a while. The night was perfect until we had to go pick up our kids from my sister's and Zoey decided she wanted to play until 3 am. Steven passed out and I stayed up playing with her. Date night buzz kill! This was the night I decided we will get a sitter to come to our house from now on!!!

We finally made it to the pumpkin patch toward the end of October. We had a day dedicated to go as a family, but it happened to be after a terrible night of sleeping, or lack thereof, from Zoey. We were just too tired, so we settled on taking a few pics of the kids in the backyard with their new pumpkins. Thankfully, my mom went with me and the kids one Saturday while Steven was working. Barrett had fun in the bounce houses and we got some cute pics, which is always the goal, right?

One of the best days of October was celebrated at my Gran's house. We went to celebrate October family birthdays, including Madison's 20th and my mom's 60th, but unbeknownst to us all, my sister had a HUGE announcement. She surprised us all with a pregnancy announcement, and we were all in tears! On the verge of starting a second round of IVF, she and her husband were shocked to find out they were pregnant...naturally! We were all overwhelmed with gratitude and excitement that she was able to experience naturally getting pregnant, and also that we get to add another little sweet baby to our family.

We also celebrated Halloween with the great-grandparents on this day so they could see all the kids in their costumes and trick-or-treat. They got to paint pumpkins in Gran's garage and splurge on eating candy, which made up for the torture of taking group pictures.

My favorite October memory was the Saturday night before Halloween. There were a lot of events going on we thought about attending, but decided to have a family night in and carve pumpkins. This was our first time carving pumpkins and it definitely won't be our last! We had so much fun carving a jack-o-lantern in the backyard blasting Halloween themed music. Barrett wouldn't touch any of the gooey stuff, but he was fascinated with the whole process. We introduced him to Michael Jackson's Thriller and danced around our yard like we had a privacy fence! Little Zoey just took it all in sitting in her walker on the porch.