October 2018 Part 6: Halloween

This year, after much brainstorming and puzzling over the challenge of coming up with a family theme that everyone could be happy with, we landed on Steampunk pirates. Michael really wanted to be a revolutionary war era soldier, and Rachel needed something super girly. So, Rachel was a Steampunk mermaid, Michael was a Steampunk Naval officer hunting the pirates, and Brian, Gabe, and I were the pirates. I LOVE how these costumes turned out, even if they did stress me out pretty badly at the time. Thank you, Partyland, for the awesome accessories!!

Brian and I had three Halloween parties: Shayne and Lea's party, our ward party, and our party we host for our friends. Our ward party was the same night as Shayne & Lea's party, but we still made it to both. And the parties meant that we got our costumes done several days BEFORE Halloween. Yay!

Here Brian and I are at Shayne and Lea's party:

Here's our Halloween Party. First activity: making pumpkin carriages to race.

John and Scooby, aka the Brawny Man and his Paper Towels

Our friends Stephanie & Brian as Mike Wasowski and Sully from Monsters Inc.

Julie and Jordan as biker gang members

 

Berta and Eduardo as Valkyrie and Thor (They won the costume contest)

Susan and Dan as themselves?

And us.

The pumpkin racers:

It was pretty fun racing pumpkins down the road like teenagers out in the dark. I got the idea from Michael; he said he did something similar at school.

We went to Nana & Papa's house to carve pumpkins this year. Kirt is a master carver! Or at least gutter! I'm not sure he actually got to carve his own design this year, but he was sure helpful with the kids' pumpkins!

We took them home and lit them up!

Gabe and I got to go to two Halloween parades, and thankfully, they weren't at the same time. This is Rachel's first Halloween parade, and the sixth graders escorted all the kindergarteners through.

Rachel was so excited that Bella got to be her escort. She's a little bit obsessed with Bella!

Bella's mom, Berta, found this Harley Davidson costume and "had to get it for Gabe."

Here's Michael at his parade:

I volunteered to take pictures at Michael's class party, so Gabe and Rachel got to go hang out with Brian at work. Looks like he kept them entertained:

Meanwhile, Michael's class had all kinds of fun Halloween things happening from science experiments

to mummy wrapping (and he got to wrap his teacher, Mz. G).

They also had story time, shadow puppets, Halloween Bingo, eating a donut off of a string, and a service project. 

We had dinner and took pictures before the trick-or-treaters started showing up (a new record)

And then Brian and I took turns taking the kids around the neighborhood. 

It was such a fun Halloween! I'm already working on costume ideas for next year (and yes, even though I'm writing this in August, I was really already scheming up new ideas for 2019 as early as October 2018).

And I have to say that Brian is pretty cute in suspenders and old-timey shirts.