Kids pray the darndest things

In her bedtime prayers the other night, Lydia entreated for these blessings:

"...that the songs we sing won't come true in real life..."

"...that we'll be safe in all our adventures..."

"...that when we make our escape we'll be safe..."

Have I mentioned Josh is our first kid to play football?

One of the main reasons he wanted to play was because he'd be the first. He wanted to do something that no one else had done. He was also attracted by the prospect of following in his old man's footsteps. We find it to be a good fit for Josh. Plenty of running and jumping around with frequent rest periods in between. He's scored a couple of touchdowns and extra points. And if they gave more points for enthusiasm, he'd be leading the league.

Do you love calico bags? Do you hate cancer?

Then I've got the auctions for you.

You know you've been a fan of Cally's fabulous bags for awhile. Now you can get one and show cancer who's boss too.
These four bags are all up on the block until Wednesday, November 10th. Right here on ebay.
Why? Maybe you've already heard about Chelsie (who has been cancer-free for five years) and her siblings running a marathon to raise money for cancer research. If not, check it out at Five in Training. They're going for $25,000 and they're almost there. Bid, bid, bid!!

Ben had a party

Throwing a Harry Potter birthday party is a cinch the second time around. We more or less repeated Emma's party from back in January. Except 9 year old boys are a whole different animal than 10 year old girls (any down time turned into a scene from WWF). We spent more time in Defense Against the Dark Arts this time too. For some reason the only thing I took photos of was transfiguration class.

Waiting for their instructions.

Dragon

Harry's glasses

Flying car

And yes, we left the candles on the ceiling up the entire 9 months between parties. We used to vote on it during dinner, whether to leave them up or take them down. The 'leave-them-ups' always won. I guess it's time to move on now...

Trunk-or-Treat / Trick-or-Treat / Outdoor Movie

Lydia really wanted to be a witch and Josh really wanted to be a mummy. That made it an easy decision to go for classic Halloween monsters as our theme this year. October was much more busy than usual, so everybody's costume was literally thrown together a couple of hours before the event. I think we turned out alright, given the last-minute nature of our costuming (except maybe poor Afton...I just felt embarrassed every time I explained that she was a ghost).

Frankenstein and his bride, mummy, ghost, witch, vampire, werewolf

Of course the kids all wanted to mix it up for their trick-or-treating attire on Saturday night. We ended up going to the mall in Maryville, it was the only place we could confirm that was officially offering treats on Saturday. We've never done a mall before, the kids seemed to like it...especially the high-bouncing thing we let them do when they'd filled their plastic pumpkins.

Pinkalicious (blowing dandelion), Lady Bug, Dead Butterfly, demon, lobster

Emma's the one doing flips, Josh is the one closer to the camera, Ben kept his turn on the short side and had already exited his harness.

After the mall, we ended our night by doing something the kids have talked about for years...we projected The Nightmare Before Christmas on to the side of the house and watched it while munching on popcorn and candy, cuddled up in blankets on the hill next to our house. We need to do this again, it worked great and everyone had a great time. P.S. It's really, really hard to get a good shot of an event like this because you know, it's dark.