Chaos ensues

This week my crazy wife decided to take advantage of some of the post-Halloween sales. Clearance crap, I have found, is kind of like a fight brewing in a bar: I'm drawn to it, because I want to see what's going on, yet in truth I want nothing to do with it (and I definitely don't want it in my house). While we did score some sweet Halloween decorations and costumes for next year on the cheap, Sarah grabbed a couple things that I generally try to avoid at all costs.

The first was some new dress-up clothes for the girls. Now, as a rule I hate dress-up clothes. When they're pulled out if the box I invariably spend the morning playing "Can you put this on me?" and mending the bumped heads brought on by the tiny, plastic, lethal high-heeled shoes the girls like to wear. (Clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp-THUD. "Waaaahhhhhh!") But whatever. If a new dress or two will occupy them for a morning, fine. I'm all for it.

The other thing to hit our cart was a haunted-house style gingerbread house kit, complete with assorted small candies and frosting packets to decorate it. Those things make me shudder, for two reasons. Number one: by the time you actually purchase the thing, get it home, unwrap it, build it, and eat it, the cookies are so ancient that they resemble concrete slabs (which I suppose is appropriate, since they're being used for building materials and all). The second reason is the potential for mess-making. Or more correctly stated,

MESS-MAKING!!!

Two preschoolers + gooey frosting + thousands of tiny sprinkles = one enormous mess that I have to clean up.

I made Sarah supervise the building activity as my revenge.

Multiple plates of tiny mess-making particles, or as some people call them, decorations.


And here we go!



First taste of frosting. It's all downhill from here, folks. Avert your eyes.


Luke, oblivious to the impending carnage, plays with the toy of the day (TotD): cookie cutters!


I can't watch!





Mary surveys her creation...


...and revels in the deliciousness of black frosting.


The amazing duck-billed cat Sarah made of fondant.


Epilogue: Luke watching Papa weep as the mess is made.

It's Halloween again

As has become our tradition, Grandma Beth came to visit over the Halloween weekend. This generally means lots of homemade bread and soup, getting things done in the yard, and trick-or-treating. There are LOTS of leaves down on our street (I think everyone is waiting until they're all done to rake) so the girls had some fun with those too. It was an interesting Halloween, getting to know a whole new neighborhood and wondering what the weather was going to do. Turns out trick-or-treating felt a lot like good old St Cloud - cool enough to need jackets but not so much that we wished we'd stayed home.
I'm short on clever things to say this time around, so we'll let the photos speak for themselves. I went a little overboard this time...

It's carving time.

Mary does not like to get dirty.

Unless it involves eating, of course.

Along with the neighbor kids, we had quite the hodgepodge of costumes.

Moosie was a vampire, complete with bloody drool.

This one cracks me up.

And they're off!

And of course there was time for the inevitable sink-bath from Grandma.