HALLOWEEN FESTIVITIES

All has been quiet on the internet front these days, so I thought it time to play a little catch up. Alex asked me why I hadn't been blogging yesterday and I'll offer you all the same truth - life is just not very inspiring these days. In between times are hard for all of us, but it seems it's usually harder on me. Almost every day we find ourselves saying to each other, 'I feel like I don't even know who I am anymore.' We miss Brooklyn. I miss Brooklyn especially. We've been staying with some friends of ours and that's always a bit complicated with different schedules and different styles of parenting, but overall still good - we mostly just miss having a home. I haven't been able to do much of what I normally do to keep myself fulfilled because you don't just pull out your tubs of fabric and sewing machine in someone else's house and go at it. I'm a very messy seamstress. I've taken to teaching myself how to knit to relieve a teensy bit of my itch to make. I feel it's slightly more polite to leave some needles and a skien of yarn laying around rather than a whole craft room. Alex has been job hunting like a pro and still no one has called. He's leaving in December for military training and won't be back until three weeks before my due date, so we were hoping to find a place and settle in a bit before he left but if there's no job, there's no home. I'm freaking out a little bit at the possibility of our second baby entering the world to two parents with no income and no home, but we're at a loss. Who let us become adults? I feel like we're really bad at adult life these days.

Now that the depressing life update is out of the way, I can catch up with a happier topic - Halloween festivities. Though technically the Balloon Fiesta isn't really Halloween related, it's an October tradition.

We woke up bright and early to try to catch the mass ascension, but it ended up being too windy for the balloons to lift off so we watched a lot of them inflate then blow over. It wasn't a total waste though - it was a beautiful morning and we got to sit in the grass with Krispy Kremes in hand and watch the sun come up over the mountains. Before we went, we had talked to Ev about watching them fly, so she kept asking, 'They gonna go up?' When we told her it was too windy she seemed a little disappointed, but was mostly glad to just see hot air balloons up close and eat donuts. The night before, we attempted to watch the balloon glow, but a sandstorm with a tad bit of rain moved in just as we were pulling into a parking spot. It only lasted ten minutes or so, but that was enough to cancel it. They already had the fireworks ready though, so when the storm cleared out they shot them off early. We watched from the car with Ev sitting on the middle console, enjoying a 'picnit dinnah.' I'm pretty sure that was the best night of her life to date. We rolled the windows down and she stuck her head out, screaming and laughing as she watched the sky. Though both events pretty much got canceled, it was still the most memorable Balloon Fiesta we've had.

After spending the morning at the Balloon Fiesta, we decided to drive up to Rio Rancho for our annual pumpkin patch trip. We go to the Galloping Grace Youth Ranch patch every year because well, they don't charge admission, they have a ton of things for kids to do (they had more animals and added a mud pie kitchen this year that Ev spend a good hour in), and all proceeds from pumpkin sales go to a good cause. If you're local, definitely make sure you check them out next year. (We also get our Christmas trees from them each year.)

For Halloween, we were park rangers and Evie was an attempted Smokey the Bear. There are really no Smokey the Bear costumes out there and we already had the bear hat, so I tried to piece one together without spending any money. She carried around a little toy shovel all night and had people drop candy into Alex's hat. We had the whole shenanigan on, frumpy grandpa pants and pine cone belts and all, but as I've said before we have a terrible track record for getting good pictures of our costumes, so top half view is all you get. We had a low key Halloween and just went trick or treating with some friends. Ev led the pack and wasn't one bit shy about yelling 'trick or treat' or grabbing handfuls of candy out of people's bowls. This was the Halloween of no return - Evie now knows that trick or treating = candy. She's been talking about it nonstop since. Luckily she still has no idea how much candy she got, where it is, or that I gave away half of it. On a side note, did you ever take inventory of your candy as a kid? My sister and I would always lay ours out and sort them into piles so we could eat the good stuff first and trade our least favorites. I started to do the same thing with Ev's candy after bedtime last night and Alex informed me that we were the weird minority in that habit - they just reached in their bag and ate all their candy, there was no second grade candy with them.

I hope everyone had a fantastic Halloween! I miss this space and am hoping to get out of this funk soon and get back to writing. What are some of the best costumes you saw? In internet world, Whitney's kid's costumes were too cute. As you can tell from past years, I love coordinated family costumes.

P.S. some balloon fiesta pictures from the last time we were able to catch the mass ascension + our 2011 skeleton costumes • last year's pumpkin patch visit • our last two year's costumes (the Flintstones and astronauts)