Halloween....It's only one day?

For many Halloween happens all in one night...it's simply October 31st and there's nothing more to it. For us (the trio) it was much more than just a night this year. For the past 2 years Mommy and Daddy have kept us pretty secluded during the winter months with only a few outtings for neccessary appointments. Last year we were lucky enough to convince Mommy and Daddy to let us do a photo shoot at a Pumpkin Patch, but that was really all our Halloween entailed last year. We had to stay home and help answer the door for other lucky trick-or-treaters last year!

This year it was MUCH different! Halloween for us started with the pumpkin patch and ended with a big hoorah, we actually got to go out trick or treating! Thanks to Boppa that is! Mommy and Daddy were prepared to settle for just the pumpkin patch again this year and maybe even some cookie decorating if we were nice and good!

 Halloween is Boppa's actual birthday and he had something better in mind! Boppa told Mommy and Daddy that it was his birthday present to take us out trick-or-treating. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here though. Let's start with the Pumpkin Patch.

A few weeks ago Mommy, Daddy, Auntie Shelley, Uncle Dominic, Grammy and Boppa all took us to a place called Hunters Family Farm. There were lots of neat animals there. We saw pigs, goats and even reindeer! Our favorite animal was the pony! We got to have our very first pony ride at the farm! It was so much fun and Mommy could remember loving pony rides when she was little like us too! There were some other fun rides at the farm as well. We all tried the bouncy dome thing, but that was not our favorite! We barely got on it so the nice man gave us our tickets back. Katelynn and Melissa tried out the carousel with Grammy, but it was way to fast for brother! It was one of those old ones that a person pedals to make it go around! It turned out to be too fast for Melissa too, but she lived through it by hugging Grammy!The best ride of the day was the BIG slide! We loved climbing to the top of the building and sliding down the big metal slide! Melissa wanted to do it many times and even was talking about it after we got home from the farm! After we did all the fun rides we could we loaded onto the tractor and rode out to the pumpkin patch fields and romped through to find our best pumpkins to take home! Ethan and Katelynn had a difficult time finding just the right one, but Melissa found hers right away! It was a tiny yellow pumpkin (not quite ready to be picked, but she wanted it). Unfortunately by the time we got it back to the tractor it was smooshed so she had to pick a new one, but not before we got a picture or two of her with it to remember! :) Here is a few pictures of our outing to the pumpkin patch!

 

What's Halloween without decorating a pumpkin right? So we took our pumpkins that we got at the pumpkin patch and we decorated them 2 year old style. We decided carving could wait a few more years until we are bigger and can be around knives safely. We found a much more fun way for us to do pumpkins this year. Mommy and Daddy found these neat no knife pumpkin decorations that turned our pumpkins into bats! So, Mommy and Daddy let us paint our pumpkins with finger paint and when they were dry they helped us poke our bat bodies into our pumpkins. Here's a few pictures of us decorating our pumpkins!

And what about cookies for Halloween? We don't eat a lot of candy yet since we are still pretty young, but we sure do love a good cookie! Our Great Aunt sent us a cookie decorating kit that was just right for our first Halloween Cookie experience. (we've done cookies before, but that was at Christmas last year and Mommy and Daddy had to help us a lot more then!) So, back to Halloween cookies. Since we had these great big cookies to decorate we decided to call for back up to help us! Uncle Dominic and Aunt Shelley came over last week and helped us decorate our cookies with Mommy while Daddy went to work! We had a great time frosting the cookies, our faces and anything else we could reach. We even snuck a few candy decorations to eat. Melissa really enjoyed candy corn! Here are some pictures from that event! See we told you, Halloween is much more than just one day! 

And last, but not least: TRICK OR TREATING! Remember this was a last minute decision. Boppa decided this was his birthday present from us the week before Halloween so we had to scramble for costumes! We must say, we think we did a fine job picking the best costumes ever for Halloween and it will be tough to top these next year! So what were we you ask? Well Ethan wanted to be a football player, so naturally his girls had to be cheerleaders right? Now to figure out which team we were going to support. You see Daddy is an Oregon Duck fan, so that was an option, but Boppa is a WSU Cougar so that would have been a good option, too, but our blood runs purple and gold naturally being born at the University of Washington! We were born Huskies folks, so there you have it! Purple and Gold for the win!

Now that we had our costumes figured out we had to decide where the best loot would be. Who was going to give us the best treats or tricks? We decided Grammy and Boppa had a really nice neighborhood with some people that Mommy trusted.  We were right! We got all kinds of yummy candy, but we also got juice pouches, tooth brushes and at Grammy and Boppa's we got new DVD's! The only problem we ran into was, we wanted to see more people.  That didn't stop us! We just hopped in the car and went to those other people we wanted to see! We got to see Our friends Annie and Phil who are long time park ranger friends of Boppa's and then we got to see our buddy Cindy who has spent many Friday afternoons with us since we were very little, she's also a park friend of Boppa's! Our favorite stop was to see Auntie Shelley and Uncle Dominic!  They gave us our favorite candy! Reeses peanut butter cups! What a fun night we had! Thanks Boppa for convincing Mommy and Daddy to let us go trick-or-treating this year!

 Here are some pictures of our adventures in trick-or-treating. 

There you have it folks! The Pitkin Trio has successfully experienced every aspect of Halloween and enjoyed every minute!