One day I’ll look back at the blog and find all the posts (and there are several) that say “Oops, it’s been a long time since I posted!” These are always followed by a flurry of posts (this time will be no exception, if I can actually blog during the holidays AND pull off Christmas…)

But back to the point: HALLOWEEN!

This year we checked off the fun points of our annual Halloween tradition:

• Hang Halloween lights in living room (purple)
• Go to Pumpkin Patch(es)
• Carve a pumpkin and let it melt into goo (sad, true)
• Attend Fall Festival(s) at girls’ schools
• Trick or Treat!

So as you’d imagine, this will be a picture-heavy post (YAY!) with costume changes and pony rides and (duh) PUMPKINS!

Our first stop: Tapia’s Farm and Pumpkin Patch!

With pony rides, a petting zoo, a farmer’s market and pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins, we were off to a great start. Plus, my mom was out to visit, so as you’d imagine, we had an extra princess there to supervise the fun:

That was Halloween costume, draft one: Jasmine & Tinkerbell. Not to be confused with the “dark sorceress” and purple ballerina pair we took to Underwood Farms (another farm, farmer’s market and fun location) with our friends Holly & Amanda to celebrate their daughter, Addie’s birthday:

Here we also enjoyed one of their favorite fair/festival/farm rituals, the great Face Painting experience:

We also had our first PONY ALARM: Zoe was too tall to ride the ponies! Imagine her sweet (dark sorceress) face upon finding out that the “you must be this tall” sign meant “you CANNOT be taller than this”… the opposite of the joy she feels at every crazy rollercoaster ride she CAN now ride. Anyway, she was a trooper and went to feed baby ducks while Ella rode a pony:

And I also got one of my favorite pumpkin patch photos of the girls, which captured the mischief my Zoe got from her dad. Oh, wait, I’m pretty sure she got that from me… This pic happened as Zoe casually but deliberately rolled Ella’s pumpkin out of the way with her foot, to Ella’s apparent dismay:

Oh, but that’s just TWO of our pumpkin patches this year! Don’t think we didn’t follow that up with a trip to Tina’s Pumpkin Patch, which ironically attracts celebrities (we’ve never seen one there) and is rated one of the best in LA – just like the other two above. Yes, we sure can pick ’em.

No costumes for this one, but Zoe WAS able to ride a pony! This time Bart’s parents were in tow (who doesn’t love a pumpkin patch?!), and while we don’t have a posed photo, if you look in front of Zoe on the pony, you can see my paparazzi skills are intact (tall man in peach shirt following cute lady in blue hat).

And to wrap it up, we went Trick Or Treating with our usual suspect families in a nearby neighborhood (ours is no bueno for Halloween…) and brought a PINK princess and a fearless Star Wars Rey out to fill bags of candy.

Knowing it would be dark before we could get photos, I asked my sweet husband to snap a few shots of the kids outside in their costumes, which ended up like this:

I will not argue that these are incredibly cute snaps, BUT I will say that a) getting the whole kid in the picture might be better for costume shot and b) there might be a better background than our white garage door. What I was expecting looked more like this:

And, also as expected, the official “Trick or Treat” shot looked like this:

This year, I actually got a chance to dress up, too, and attend the “Murder Mansion” event at the Magic Castle with my friends Sharon & Rebecca (both of whom I work with and who are now licensed magicians!). Following is the photo booth proof of attendance for that, including Sharon, me and her friends Dana & Grace:

Mommy can apparently be a dark sorceress, too :)

And so, Halloween was a smash! Better yet, it kicked off a whole great holiday season (oh, you’ll see!) filled with Thanksgiving and Christmas family traditions as we joyfully choose to NOT TRAVEL during these holidays. Now THAT is a TREAT!

Boo!