All Hallows Eve

So this past Halloween marked the first of the "Seconds" for our family. And by that I mean, up until now, all of the holidays, trips, events, and other annual occasions, had always been the first time we'd done them together as a family. We'd had Claudia and Joe on an over night stay just before their placement last year over Halloween, so this was the first annual event that we'd already done once before. It was really fantastic to think back over the past year and how far we've come, grown, learned and changed.

So this year, Claudia was a Princess (not a Disney one, just Princess Claudia for the evening) and Joe was a Cowboy. Darren had to order Joe's guns (cap guns) online since apparently it's not PC to sell any sort of toy resembling a gun anymore. How sad. And Theia was a monkey, it was so fitting, and when we picked out the outfit in the store and she tried it on, she instantly started laughing and jumping around so we knew it was the one for her. These are a just a couple photos of them from the beginning of the evening.




Claudia's hair was done in a French Braid, starting off center at the base of her skull, braiding up and around her head in a crown. (after all a woman's hair is her crown right?) She loved it, or I should say she loved when I was finished. About half way through she moans "AND WE'RE NOT EVEN DONE YET! SIGH!!" It was very funny, but she knew it would be worth it, and everyone who saw her that night ooohhh'd and ahhhh'd over her hair and reinforced that she'd made the right choice by suffering through the process. Here are a couple photos of the finished result.



Early in the evening we lost Joe, fortunately we did get him back, but for the most part that's how the evening was. He was off doing his Cowboy stuff and we just kinda let him be. Theia was a wreck pretty much all day. We'd been at church since 11 am and the event didn't start until 6 pm. She slept a couple times for about 30 minutes in her stroller, but as any mom of a 12 month old knows, that didn't help much. Needless to say, by 9 pm she was one pooped monkey! Here's a photo of her as she got too tired to fight being in the stroller.



All in all it was fantastic. The kids had a blast and no naps aside, it couldn't have gone much better.