I know I’m a week late, but I wanted to get my Halloween post up before I let time get away from me.

Lil painted a pumpkin last year, she loved it and I loved that I came up with something new. I had never heard of anyone painting a pumpkin. This year you can’t hit a random blog without seeing a painted pumpkin. I take full credit for it, you are so welcome.

I knew that I wanted to have Lil paint pumpkins again this year since she loves painting and I thought it would be a good tradition. She and I picked a few little pumpkins at the local grocery store and she couldn’t wait to paint them.

We knew that we were going to go to a pumpkin patch, but we went ahead and bought a couple of large pumpkins at the grocery store because they were on sale, and I can’t pass up a good sale. These pumpkins didn’t even get out of our car till the weekend before Halloween. They just sat in the back seat floorboard for weeks, going shopping with us and the library and everywhere we went like little pets. Pets we don’t have to feed or clean up after. The perfect pets really.

I read in the paper that there were three pumpkin patches around our little city and I choose the smallest sounding one for our trip. It was at a small family farm. They have an organic pick your own apple orchard. It was so quaint, I loved it.

We were the only customers there. We climbed aboard the hayride that was going to take us to the pumpkin patch. We were escorted by the 3 year old granddaughter of the farmers, she was a hoot. We were told that because there hadn’t been a frost yet the pumpkins were still on the vine, it was so neat to see them in their natural habitat.

At first Lil was scared of the hay ride, but then she spotted the turkeys and everything was good after that.

The turkeys are the white dots at the end of the pumpkin field.

See our little friend?

She was so cute. You could tell that she likes to be with the pumpkin patch people.

Her grandpa called her to help him with some un-named task after this picture.

One of our pumpkins. I decided that we needed some white pumpkins to paint.

The TURKEYS!

I loved the pumpkin patch, but I didn’t get the pumpkin photos I wanted from this place so I planned on going to one of the other more commercial patches in the area the next weekend.  I’ll let you know right now that we never made it to any other patches.  I don’t want to keep anyone in unnecessary suspense.

We did however go the the zoo the next day and they had just had their “Boo at the Zoo” so I was hoping to get some good pictures there.

I was shocked to see that they had mostly cleaned up all the Halloween stuff.  A few hay bales, the 1 fake pumpkin display and some scattered pumpkins were all that remained.

And while I did get some great pictures, I still didn’t feel I had “The Halloween Pictures” yet.

Lily really wanted her zoo ice cream at this point.

I really wanted a few more pictures.

We went to get ice cream after this. Who can resist this face?

After we got home Waldo and I carved our pumpkins and Lily painted hers.  It was so fun doing this all as a family.

I let Lily paint my pumpkin after I was done carving.

Halloween morning I had a brilliant idea. I grabbed Lily, my camera and my phone and we headed to the front porch.

I finally got “The Halloween Pictures” I wanted, I couldn’t be happier.

Of course the major fun was still to come.

I made the wand. I was quite proud of it. So of course I carried it around while we trick or treated. Isn’t that how it always works out.

Lily had been playing with her bucket all week and Halloween day I noticed it looking at me all sad and boring so I grabbed my silver sparkly glitter glue paint stuff and a couple of cotton swabs and fancied up the face. Lil loved it.

This was our first house to visit. We had been telling Lil all about how Halloween and trick or treating worked and she was pumped to say trick or treat to the neighbor. That was all in theory, because as soon as the door opened all she said was “I’m a little shy” when we encouraged her to say “trick or treat”. We went to probably a dozen houses and on the next to last house she whispered “trick or treat” and “thank you”, we were so proud.

My plan was to let Lily had a piece or two of her candy over the next few days and give the rest away to the kids that came to our door, but we didn’t really have that many trick or treaters. I totally wasn’t surprised when she played with the candy after we got home, but never asked for any of it. She was treating it like any other prop in her toy collection and we loved it. Waldo and I thought about offering her a piece that night, but we talked ourselves out of it because she is so used to not having candy that it wasn’t weird for her to not have any. We did promise her a piece the next day and we fulfilled that promise. After breakfast I let her pick from the small selection we left in her basket. She choose a long tootsie roll and I gave her about a third of it while eating the rest myself. She loved it.  That was the end of halloween candy for Lily Bean and we are all fine with that.

During my twenties when people would ask me what I was doing for this holiday or that I would tell them “nothing, I don’t really DO holidays. I assume that when I have kids that will change”.  It totally has. I had so much fun planning halloween for Lily and can’t wait for next year.