October...

It's been a little while since my first post (shocker), so I thought I'd recap the last couple weeks in one post. Better late, than never, eh?

Halloween, Trick-Or-Treating, and the Pumpkin Patch...

This year was so much fun, being able to take both the boys to all the Halloween festitivies. Garrett was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Leonardo, to be exact. And Isaac was a skeleton. Once again, both of their personalities rang true. Isaac, of course, wanted to see how much candy he could stuff in his mouth at one time. Garrett, of course, wanted to see as many spider webs, ghosts, skeletons, and decorated haunted houses as he could. That means, for the past month, we've been doing decorated house "drive-bys." In fact, it got so bad that the "drive-bys" became a sort of reward or incentive to Garrett that we were doing daily. "Eat your veggies and we'll go see the spider webs!"

Here's the thing...you know when you visit Hollywood and can pay good money to take a tour around town, just to "drive by" all the famous people's houses? Yeah, it's kinda been like that around here lately. I think by the time Halloween actually arrived, we had about 8 houses on our route. And, keep in mind, these houses are NOT close together. Posh Spice and Tom Cruise may live close to each other in Beverly Hills, but the "spider web" house and the "eyes in the trees" house do not. I think my gas bill went up at least $50 this month. I don't know who's more happy that this hallowed season is over; me, or the confused owners of the houses on our tour. Next year, I may have to print brochures, charge a fee, and start my own "best-Halloween-decorated-houses-in-all-of-North-Texas" touring company.

October and Halloween also bring about our annual adult costume party. This year was our 5th year in a row that we've had the party. It's always a fun event. And being that it's not every day that you see grown men in tights or makeup, at least we have one day a year where they can (somewhat) get away with it.

I was thinking back to all the fun costumes Jeff and I have come up with. I think my favorite was when we rented Wizard of Oz costumes. I was the Cowardly Lion, and Jeff was the Scarcrow. This year, we decided to throw back to the good ol' years and went as Ghostbusters.

Another annual event that we had to do was the Pumpkin Patch. And on a scale of 1-10, our PP is about a 7. This PP is not just a normal "find your pumpkin and let's get the heck outta here" PP. It has a petting farm, hay-ride, free hot dogs, and um...oh yeah, pumpkins. Every year I've taken the boys with our ward's playgroup, but this year I decided to wait for Jeff to go with us so we could go as a family.

We started our family fun day with a stop at MY favorite, gourmet restaurant, IHOP. Honestly, who wouldn't pass up a 3-cheese omlet and the best pancakes ever?! Delicious. Jeff says he'll never understand why waiting for 45 minutes on a Saturday morning just to have breakfast is all that appealing to me. But it is! I love it!

After breakfast we drove out to Celina to the PP. The boys loved the petting farm and the hay ride. My favorite part was loading up Jeff with as many pumpkins as he could carry for only $10. I just kept saying "one more!" The funny thing is, we only carved two of them. I guess it was the principal of the whole thing, right?

So...with the end of October brings the start of the true holiday season. I wasn't surprised when on Thursday morning, November 1st, the Christmas commericials were in full swing. Thus, I'm already debating to put my tree up next week. Shoot, the darn thing takes me two days to put up! A few more weeks of enjoying it wouldn't kill anyone, right? I mean, Nordstroms has probably already beat me to it!

Anyway, that's about it. The month of October was much more eventful and busy than I can sum up in a few paragraphs. But in the end, all is well and we are happy. The house is still for sell. It was a quiet month for showings so we are hoping that next month will pick up some. Many of you have asked what our plan is when we sell it. At this point, we still aren't sure. All we know is that Jeff's commute of an hour and 10 minutes is really start to get to him (and me!). But the thought of moving away from our "home" is too much to think about. So we're just taking one step at a time. Sell the house and then we'll see. Who knows, maybe this time next year we could be back in Utah!

So...with that said, IHOP anyone?