Out and About

At the end of the week, I took the kids out for some fun.  On Friday, we picked up some dear friends and went to IHOP for free Scary Face Pancakes.  I was so happy, because the kitchen made my favorite sandwich, the Spinach and Roasted Red Pepper Melt, even though it hasn’t been on the menu for quite some time.  Yay!  I’ve missed it so. 

Then we rushed from there to drop our friends off, put the leftovers in the fridge, and head off to BJ’s Wholesale Club for a homeschool field trip.  This is the first time in the decades I’ve been a BJ’s member that they’ve organized such a thing.  They said one of the store’s main managers homeschools and had done similar events at other places in the past and wanted to give it a try here.  Yay!  The kids got to decorate cupcakes and cookies, get their faces painted, do some coloring and crafts, and play games together.  Holden’s hearty laugh could be heard across the room as he played games with the other kids.  It was great to see them having such a good time with other homeschoolers.  They each left with a balloon and a goodie bag of candy and activities to take home.  It was really neat!  The store took a group photo of all the kids in attendance, so it will be cool to see if they post it somewhere in the store, like on a bulletin board.

At the end of the day, I scored an Elsa costume (a princess character from the Disney movie Frozen) for Haylee from freecycle.  She was so excited!  We hadn’t been able to find her a used costume this year, so she was just planning to recycle one from a past Halloween, so that really made her day!

After spending all day at soccer on Saturday, I snuck out early with Haylee (Holden was still playing in his soccer game) to go to our community costume contest and trunk-or-treat.  Low and behold, Haylee won 2nd place in the costume contest for her age group!  She won a $10 Target gift card. 

 

Then we all finally made it home to shower and eat a quick dinner of leftovers before it was time to go out and trick-or-treat.  To complicate things, at about 5:15, I let the dogs out to go to the bathroom, and Teenie dug out under the fence…followed by giant Lilly, who busted right through the fence and broke off 3 slats!  They were off into the next neighborhood, which borders ours on the other side of our fence.  So I had to jump in the van and go over there to retrieve them before all those trick-or-treaters hit the streets!  Thankfully, I found both of them and got them home in time.  Shew!  Crisis averted.

Steve and Hayden were too tired from soccer to go trick-or-treating with us, so it was just me and the kids with our neighbor friends.  We had a good time, but there were so few houses participating in our neighborhood this year that we zipped through with 45 minutes left.  So we rushed home and all of us decided to hop in my van and go to the next neighborhood to finish up our trick-or-treating over there.  That was cool!  Val and I rode along in my van and dropped the kids off at small stretches of participating homes until it was 8:00.  Haylee declared it to be the best Halloween ever!