Halloween 2019

If there was one phrase that sums up who I am it would be "family traditions". Family is everything to me and I cherish every opportunity to create precious memories doing our family's treasured traditions. Halloween day is another one of those wonderful opportunities to create awesome memories with special traditions.

Food is typically one of the major highlights of our fun family traditions. On Halloween day we kick off the celebration with monster donuts and yogurt. Since our family is ever growing, this year I also added in some donut holes.

Lydia could hardly wait to dig into her donuts, so much so she was nibbling off other folks plates. Good thing she's the current baby and spoiled rotten, lol.

On last years Halloween clearance sales I acquired a cute Halloween bingo game, so we broke it out this year and played a few rounds during our homeschool table time.

For lunch we had jack-o-lantern cheese crisps.

Here's the trick-or-treating crew this year! The two older boys have since outgrown the dress-up phase and no longer join in on the dress-up fun. But, this year our second oldest was kind enough to drive the truck and trailer through the neighborhood.

It was really hard to get everyone dressed and ready this year. It had rained most of the day and was bitterly cold. We just aren't used to that at Halloween time. Since it was so muddy I didn't get very many pictures and the sun was actually setting before we were all ready anyways ~ 

which did not leave much time for picture taking. 

Lydia was absolutely hilarious about having her face 'painted'!!! She wouldn't even move her mouth to speak when I was done. Her eyes were big as silver dollars, in shock, thinking that I had done something terrible to her. But, once she saw Tabitha and me with our faces painted she was ok. 😂

Most of this year's costumes were hand-me-downs. We had a major Halloween catastrophe about 30 minutes before we were supposed to head out. Upon trying to put the children's costumes on we discovered one of our littles boys costume did NOT fit. Thankfully we had extra costumes in the hand-me-down box and we found a suitable replacement. 

Absolutely NEVER a dull moment with this family!

 Every year we hook up a trailer, load it up with hay, and go on a hay ride trick-or-treating through a nearby subdivision. As I mentioned earlier, it was bitterly cold and we had a house full of sick children. Most of them were coming out of their sickness, but still had terrible coughs. About half way through our Halloween night adventures, most of our kiddos were miserable, freezing cold, and ready to go home. We made a parental command decisions to take the little ones home and daddy took the rest of the children to finish up trick-or-treating. As you can see we still ended up with a ton of candy and everyone had a blast. 

Another Halloween under wraps and as is our custom, another epic story to go along with it. 

At this point we just own it ~ pure organized chaos folks, lol.

 But hey this event came with perks....

A 'boat-load' of candy which helps tremendously when it comes to balancing out all the crazy 

that makes our life ~ our life! 

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer 

Pumpkin Carving Party

(The above pumpkin was the one carved by the big boys and daddy ~ 

I love a classically carved pumpkin!)

Y'all this post that I'm sharing today is all about one of my all-time favorite family traditions ~ our annual Pumpkin Carving Party. I suppose it isn't exactly a party since it's just our immediate family, but there is eleven of us, so I guess that's enough people to constitute a party, lol! 

 Our pumpkin carving party includes fun festive food like jack-o-lantern chicken pot pie, pumpkin patch dirt cake, and orange ice cream floats. We also read the Pumpkin Patch Parable. While we carve our pumpkins we play fun Halloween music. 

Even when we weren't 'celebrating' halloween we always did our pumpkin carving party. I mean what is so bad about reading a sweet bible-based story, eating cute food, and carving a pumpkin?!

I've been on the hunt for the 'perfect' dirt cake for many years, and I think I finally found it with this one. I'm not so sure if it was the actually recipe or the fact that I left some of the Oreo cookies kind of thicker instead of pulverizing the whole bag in my high powered blender. Talk about yummy! 

Yes, y'all I did splurge and ate a few bites!!

My little dinner helper that night. I can remember the days when we couldn't even eat one chicken pot pie and now were throwing down two of them, lol.

Obviously the traditional pumpkin carving party group photo was not going to happen this night. In their defense, over half of them were pretty sick~ sigh, I hate when my babies are sick!

This year we carved two pumpkins. Daddy and I carved one with the little children while the bigger boys tried their hands at doing one all by themselves.

The fellas learned real quick that carving pumpkins isn't as easy as it looks. 

There's nothing quite like a little hands-on learning. 

There's just something fascinating about carving a pumpkin. 

All that goop, strings, and seeds.
**note**
Make sure you put news paper down under the pumpkins before you start to carve,
it makes clean-up so much easier; and that's speaking from years of experience!

Everyone took a turn digging out the pulp and getting all yucky. 

FUN! FUN! A perfect activity for little boys who love to get dirty.

Even though Lydia was puny, she thoroughly enjoyed her turn at scraping out the pumpkin. She was so serious about the task, taking every opportunity to explore the pumpkin and it's contents.

Nothing fancy for our family's pumpkin carving. As a matter of fact the one dear ol' mom carved barely resembled the cat I intended it to be!! But, my children, forever the optimists, didn't judge and even said the pumpkin looked like a cat, lol. I suppose it really isn't that the pumpkins are carved into some intricate design, but the simple fact that we spent precious time together making memories. 

Creating family traditions really is super easy and takes little effort from mom and dad, mostly only in the planning phase, anyways. This particular family tradition we've been doing for 19 years ~ ever since we had our first son. Over the years it has been adapted, but for the past couple of years I've set in stone the menu and activities. This way everyone knows what's coming for our yearly Pumpkin Carving Party. Having a plan also makes my job super easy and insures we actual DO our annual Pumpkin Carving Party! Let's face it, life get's super busy and it can become super easy to simply say "next year", but remember we can't get this day back ~ the years fly by, make every day count! 

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer

Holiday Muddy Buddies

Happy Halloween

I have to start off with apologizing for my absence! You know how it goes, everyone has that one month or season where you're just insanely busy and it's a major struggle to get everything you want, done. Sadly, my blogging has taken a back seat lately because October is our busiest month of the year! I seriously have at least a dozen posts headed your way; I just have to find the time to get them posted! 

Since I am so behind with my posts and today is Halloween, I thought I'd share a fun seasonal/holiday recipe, and then I'll go back and start posting, in order, all the other posts I have planned, lol.

To me the holidays are never complete without loads of fun food, especially recipes that are easy for kids to make. On Halloween we eat a plethora of festive foods, but this year we added in Halloween Muddy Buddies. This is a super easy snack mix to make, so much so that even your little ones can lend a hand. This recipe is easily adapted for any holiday with the appropriate colored chocolate M&M's. Since it is Halloween, we used Halloween colored M&M's.

Holiday Muddy Buddies

Ingredients 

1 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup peanut butter

1/4 cup butter

9 cups Chex cereal (I used a whole box of Aldi brand corn Chex cereal)

1 cup confectioners sugar

1 bag holiday colored chocolate M&M's

Directions 

Line two large jelly roll pans with parchment paper. Pour cereal into a large bowl. Melt chocolate chips, peanut butter, and butter in a glass bowl in the microwave. Pour melted chocolate mixture over cereal and toss with spoon until evenly coated. Pour cereal onto cookie sheets, dividing evenly. Cool in fridge for 30 minutes. Pour cereal back into large bowl and toss with sugar. Add M&M's. Ready to eat immediately or store in air tight container.

I realize a lot of conservative Christians do not celebrate Halloween, and I 100% support that decision. (We went many years without celebrating the day!) But, now we've adapted the holiday to fit our lifestyle and simply use it as an opportunity to create fun family memories. We are intentional to keep it light, fun, and void of the dark scary stuff that often overshadows a fun day to dress up and use your imagination. 

Making festive food is just another wonderful addition to our family's Halloween celebrations. It didn't take more than an hour (and not all at one time) to make this fun treat. My kiddo thought it was a great festive snack. There was nothing spooky or 'bad' about this snack mix ~ only a special holiday memory of baking with mom on Halloween. Life is what WE make it to be, even a holiday like Halloween!

So to all our fellow Halloween celebrating friends ~ be safe, make those treasured memories, and enjoy your evening!

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer