Halloween 2012

So most of you (or those of you who do the facebook anyway) are probably aware that Adele had a scary (for me) issue on Sunday and had to go to the emergency room. She had a rectal prolapse which basically means that the inside of her butt fell out. Yeah, really. It was not fun.  Luckily it seems that it was most likely caused by constipation and having general muscle weakness anyway, and by treating the constipation it should hopefully not happen again, but we're still waiting for the blood test results to rule out a variety of much worse possibilities. She seems to have recovered from the experience though I'm still anxious every time she goes to the bathroom! In more positive news she has been working on potty training and is doing a really incredible job! She's a superstar.

So after that was this week which contained today - the most wondrous of all days - Halloween. Fiona has been extremely excited for Halloween and wanted to decorate and carve pumpkins and watch scary stuff on TV and anything else halloween-y. So we did. On Monday we made cookies, and on Tuesday we frosted them...

And decorated them...

 

And then we carved some pumpkins... the girls made some delightful faces as they scooped out the guts!

 (Adele is refusing to let me remove her hospital bracelet and I don't care enough to fight her on it)

Fiona designed the face and I wielded the tools. The girls were pretty happy with their creation!

Spoooooooooooky!

Then today was the big day! The girls got to wear their costumes to preschool and that was very exciting. Then this evening we headed down to Apple Valley to trick or treat with the cousins.

On the way there is this house... we pass it a couple of times most days and the girls are fascinated by it. They call it the spooky house. After preschool we stopped and got out of the car to have a closer look at all the spooky stuff. Fiona was nervous but Adele reassured her and told her there was no monster. This guy has been setting up for weeks and goes all out with the creepy decorations including tableaus of real flattened roadkill squirrels being pecked at by real taxidermied birds. I would not be in the least surprised if he has the corpse of his mother in his basement. We didn't linger long as Fiona was becoming increasingly agitated, but the amount of scary stuff packed in there was impressive!

The sun set while we were driving and I took this picture from the bridge over the Minnesota river on 77. 

Then... trick or treating time!!

The whole gang...

Adele waked the entire way, including up a large hill. At one of the houses there was a guy in a really impressive home made robot costume handing out candy and as soon as Adele spotted him she froze and refused to go any further. She squeaked out a "no, thank you"  when he took off the head and offered her a treat and backed away immediately. She's still talking about the "scary robot that was too scary".

Fiona somehow remembered that I love almond joy (bountys with a nut on top for the Brits) and she specifically picked one out to share with me. As soon as she got it at the house she was at she showed me and told me about it. She's awesome. 

Happy girls!

In the end Fiona changed her mind about the mermaid costume and wore her cat costume from last year. She really loves that cat costume!

We had a great time! Happy Halloween everyone!

Afternoon project

This afternoon Adele refused to take a nap so after a couple of episodes of Dinosaur Train I forced myself to turn off the TV and find some kind of project to entertain the girls during what was going to be a long afternoon. Both of them love to paint but due to the extremely high mess potential we don't do it all that often. Today was the day though. Fiona has been really interested in Dinosaurs lately so I thought it would be fun for Fiona to make a Dinosaur world for her Dinos to play in. I cut up an old box and set her to work painting grass and sky etc., to make a prehistoric background.

Great! Ok, now let's get Adele painting...

Perfect! Ok, now they are both occupied, I should empty the dishwasher!

I turned back after opening the dishwasher door and... please don't paint in your hair Adele!

Thirty seconds later... Adele! Paint goes on the paper!

Adele... what are you doing?!

How's Fiona doing? Just fine. Ok, great. 

I refocus Adele on painting on the paper instead of herself and assist Fiona with some parts of her project. I look up and realize Adele is painting the chair next to her and when I walk around the table I found that she's also quietly peed all over the chair she's sitting on (yep, potty training). 

I clean her up and pop a diaper on her (yep, giving up, maybe she'll be potty trained by high school). I walk to the bathroom to deal with the laundry and on my return I find... this. 

Adele has now decided that her mouth tastes funny and she's done with painting. So... now what? Adele's covered in paint but Fiona is having a great time and needs some help with the rest of her project. Where do you contain a very painty child when you're trying to pay attention to her sister too? The sink!

At which point it seemed like a good idea to have a one of these. 

YAY! Sink bath!! 

Fiona and I made some more things for Dino Land and then she got to work adding the lava.

After Adele started eating all the bubbles sink bath was over. Fiona put the finishing touches on Dino Land and the Dinosaurs got to check it out. They were too excited to wait for the paint to dry so got to have some fun stomping around making footprints. The Dinos needed a bath later too, but Fiona took care of that for me. 

Despite the incredible mess we all had a lot of fun :-)

And no, I never did manage to get the dishwasher emptied!