Halloween traditions

I love Halloween. This year has been excellent and I've been so excited now that Jaydin is getting old enough to understand what's going on. It's been fun starting some new family traditions. Here are a few things we have been doing this past week in celebration of Halloween.

For the past few years, we have been going to the Syracuse pumpkin walk with Brady's brother and his family. We go to their house before to have a fun chili dinner and my sister-in-law makes fabulous carmel apples. Then we take the kids over to the pumpkin walk and a good time is had by all.

This was Brady's favorite pumpkin

On Wednesday, we went to Black Island Farms in Syracuse. I had never been to a "real" pumpkin patch before to pick out pumpkins and I have to say, this will for sure be a tradition in our family now. We had so much fun! We got there right as they were opening for the day, so we were the only ones on the "hay ride" and the guy that took us out was awesome. He took us clear to the back of the farm where the big ones were and spent quite a while helping us pick good ones. On the way back we passed a patch of small pumpkins and Jaydin was yelling "Cute baby pumpkins!" so the guy stopped the tractor, got off, and picked a small one just for her. It was so cute. She said to me "Nice of him, Mommy!" Yes, it was very nice of him. She has been carrying around the baby pumpkin for the last few days. She even wraps it in a blanket sometimes. She wanted to sleep with it, but I talked her out of it, luckily. :) After we got our pumpkins, the driver even helped us carry them to our car. They have so much to do there in addition to picking pumpkins. They have a farmer's market, slides, pig races, a little train, animals, a corn cannon, a few corn mazes, and lots of other things for kids to do. Highly recommended.

Then we carved our pumpkins. I assumed Jaydin would love touching the "guts", but she was not at all interested. At least I got her to pose for a picture pretending she's scooping them out, but that's about as close as we got. I think they turned out pretty awesome though.

Only a man would use a power tool to carve a pumpkin...

We also made a haunted gingerbread house this week. Don't look too closely, it sort of looks like a 2 year old made it...I'll give Jaydin credit for it. I've been wanting to try my hand at cake decorating, but this experience proves I probably shouldn't. It was fun anyway.

Then last night we went trick-or-treating at the grandparents houses. We stopped at a few houses in my mom's neighborhood so Jaydin got plenty of candy to keep her hyper for a few weeks. Here's Jaydin with some of her cousins.

Isn't this pretty much the cutest beenareena you've ever seen?