While putting up the Halloween decorations outside last week, I started humming "it's the most wonderful time of the year" and I've had it stuck in my head ever since. I do apologize to those who associate that phrase and song with Christmas. While that particular holiday is wonderful, enchanting, tons of fun and a time to celebrate life & family...Halloween is just darn FUN and I love it! Maybe it's because so much imagination and creativity is involved...maybe it's the candy...maybe it's all the good memories I have from childhood trick-or-treating. Whatever it is, I'm happy it's October and time to dig out the ol' orange and black.

Of course we got things kicked off with our camping trip last weekend so we were already in costume/candy/Halloween story mode as the first of October hit on Thursday. Here were some events from our week:

Wednesday, September 30th - get Halloween decorations from basement, start unpacking and taking inventory

Thursday, October 1st - put up indoor and outdoor decorations, remove all the window clings from the sliding glass door and start working on some bats, pumpkins and other assorted Halloween stuff! Experiment on candy from last weekend. I only have one picture from that event and it's on my phone, but we submerged skittles in water and saw how the S on the top floats away intact, tested the acidic level of nerds candies by dissolving them in water and sprinkling the water with baking soda. Then we microwaved some starbursts. We have a few more experiments planned after the 31st. I want to try the density rainbow at http://www.candyexperiments.com/ - pretty cool!! Thursday night, Brian made a batch of chili which seemed perfect for the autumn weather.

Friday, October 2nd - made pumpkin spice pretzels, bat-shaped peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for lunch, made cut out Halloween sugar cookies, made all-time favorite pumpkin cookies

I don't think we'll be able to keep up this pace for the next 27 days, but we're off to a good start celebrating...well...the most wonderful time of the year ;)

Here are the bat PB&Js. I have found that cutting out fun shapes leads to more actual food consumption by all three boys. I usually cut out stars, but bats are super cool!
I found a quick and easy recipe for pretzels and Hershey kisses in a Target brochure that I saved from last year. It was a great cooking project for the boys. They did a fantastic job unwrapping the candies and placing them carefully on each pretzel. A few did end up in tummies of course...including mine! These kisses are pumpkin spice flavor! Apparently only sold at Target.
I put almonds on some of them. They're now in the fridge and are quite yummy. I'm thinking I might experiment with other kiss flavors...maybe dark chocolate or a peppermint flavor during Christmas...maybe caramel :)

Working on Halloween window clings

bats, a haunted house...um....and a basketball :)

Dark picture, but I finally found a good use for these super cute indoor lanterns. I feel like I have an interesting lack of decorating space in our house. I set these up on shoe boxes covered with black felt in the dining room and put those battery-powered lights inside of them.

Another not-so-great picture of the outdoor decorations. Lights are hard to photograph. These are mostly the same ones we took camping with a couple more items that I didn't drag to our camp site.

Not all that exciting, but here's my Halloween wreath.

And here is a sign I made with an Uppercase Living transfer.

Sugar shock! These puddles of icing are actually covering cut-out cookies that the boys made. They are quite tasty....and induce brief periods of high energy followed by a dramatic

drop in activity level (kidding!)And finally...pumpkin cookies (more like pumpkin bread in cookie form). We used to have a cookie jar just like this one when I was growing up and it was often filled with these cookies. I'm sure my mom still has it (right mom?) When I saw it at Target last week...it was so nostalgic for me that I couldn't resist.

Happy Halloween!!