Hanging with the Hockenberrys: Happy Halloween!

I just realized that I had written half of this Halloween post and then forgot to finish it. That makes me sad. I have way too much catching up to do. Stay tuned for Christmas and Easter.

Let me start by saying that the closest I've been to a Halloween pumpkin in years is the 12 oz bottles of Pumpkin Ale that I start scavenging the second Fall hits. But, being as we're parents now, we have to put on our big kid (i.e. non-lazy) pants and try to channel our childhoods enough to remember exactly what we're supposed to do.

I haven't carved a pumpkin in YEARS, so I was pretty excited to dust off my Mad Skillz. I thought Grey would have a ball digging through the pumpkin guts. I thought wrong. He wanted nothing to do with them. Booooring.

This is about as close as he was willing to get to the pumpkin gutting.

After Daddy finished the pumpkin prep, Mommy got to go to town making them into Jack O' Lanterns. Which was REALLY easy with a toddler "helping" on my lap. I can't think of a safer scenario than having a toddler on my lap while wielding a knife.

The final result of Mommy's Mad Skillz.

Emerson is obviously impressed.

The Trick or Treating part almost didn't happen for us this year. With Hurricane Sandy having hit the east coast just a few days prior, we were still getting weather from her. That meant that even though Halloween is normally cold in Michigan, this year it was really cold. And windy. And rainy. It was definitely not a Texas-style Halloween (meaning Kevin and I weren't sitting out on our front lawn in our shorts with a bucket of ~~beer~~ candy between us).

My little monkey. Fitting.

My tiny ballerina.

I had to sneak in a picture of my adorable niece Addie!

In order to maximize ~~our~~ Greyden's candy gathering potential, we decided that we should do a practice run before hitting the big leagues (meaning the houses passing out candy that I didn't buy). Kevin walked him out the garage door and around the front of the house where I was armed with a bowl of candy (and my camera). When he rung the doorbell, I opened up the door and he looked at me with a very, very confused look on his face. We prompted him to say trick or treat so that I could put a piece of candy in his Thomas the Train candy bucket. Instead, he looked at the candy, looked at the bucket, held it out to me, and said "just put it in there." I could pretty much see ~~our~~ Grey's candy potential going down the tubes. Fortunately once we did hit the road with him he didn't tell anyone that, but he also didn't tell anyone Trick or Treat. Or please or thank you for that matter. I guess his cuteness must have won out over his manners because he came home with more candy than any 2 year old would ever need. Especially since Evil Mommy still thinks he's a little too young for candy.