Farewell to October

October is always a fun month for us!

Katie turned ELEVEN! 

She got a pet for her birthday, neon tetra and some tetra that glow in this special tank that is really neat!

She has loved having a pet finally!

Katie requested coconut cake, so I had to post a picture of this delicious cake.  I am quite proud of my first attempt at making coconut cake. Very yum!

Here she is all dressed up for her birthday dinner.  She chose Provino's.

Our kids absolutely crack me up.  After pointing out that it didn't really matter what she named the fish because it's not like they would ever come if she called them, Katie (after Noah coming up with this idea sort of), decided that a "wheel of fish names" was in order.  So she spins it every day and gets to use all the names she came up with for her fish. One name means they all that same name for the day.

Katie and me before going out for her birthday dinner.

And of course, Halloween! Ruby's first time trick-or-treating! (last year we stayed in with friends)

I did NOT choose to buy or go all out for this child's costume.  With her personality, going through any trouble for a costume would certainly guarantee her refusal to wear it.  So we just raided the dress up box before going out.  I DID buy her some $1 wings at the dollar tree since we didn't have any surviving wings at the moment.

Katie chose to be a "roman princess."  Meme whipped up this toga/robe a couple of weeks ago and we used some silky fabric for the scarf thing.  Some gold binding finished up the details.

Fancy hair and makeup were the finishing touches.  She looked beautiful!

Noah was the first to really decide on his costume.  After seeing this idea posted on Pinterest, all it took was some printer ink, gluestick, a box, and time.  It was just printed out from a tutorial online and pasted on the box.  Pretty easy!

Here they all are together before going out to Trick or Treat on Broad Street in Rome.

Ruby got used to the idea very quickly!  She loved it, and even more I think loved seeing all the other kids in costumes.

Grandpa walked a block with us then cut out! When we were done (a WHILE later) she noticed he wasn't with us anymore and asked where "Papa" went.

Meme dressed up as a pumpkin, ha ha!

After we finished we went back to Meme's office (a block away) and Noah immediately sorted his candy to see what he got.

Our of order pic! A store had this set up in front.

Ruby was SO EXCITED about eating candy! She had a piece in each hand going back and forth licking and taking bites.

And to finish off the day of junk, we had "spooky face pancakes" for dinner.  IHOP was supposedly giving out free spooky face pancakes for kids all day, but we decided to just pick up a couple of things and make our own. The one above is Noah's creation.

This one is Ruby's.  I did the hair with apples to encourage her to eat SOMETHING good, ha ha.

Mine! That's some Orville Reddenbacher prepopped kettle corn.  good stuff.

And Katie's pretty design.

It was threatening rain all afternoon but turned into a nice cool evening.

We finished up the night with handing out candy to trick or treaters.  We actually ran out of two HUGE bags of candy and gave out some of Ruby's candy (oops! not like she was going to actually eat it all!).  They LOVED LOVED handing out candy! Ruby squealed and could not have more enjoyed putting candy in the kids buckets, and loved seeing all the costumes.

It was a fun night!

26 days till Thanksgiving!