Halloween Ray style

In all honesty, I hate Halloween. I'm just not into it at all. I get sick of seeing scary stuff decorated all over our neighborhood and seeing the hype that his holiday gets. For our family, we just don't make a big deal out of Halloween. And our kids don't seem to be bothered at all by not going trick or treating. They got a bag of candy from us and that satisfied their sweet tooth just fine. The kids do still enjoy carving pumpkins, kind of. The boys don't like to get their hands in the pumpkin goo and despise cleaning out the pumpkin. Anna doesn't mind and happily helped her big brothers with this part. It's nice that they are all at an age where they don't require a ton of hands on help from the adults in the house. So the pumpkins were carved on Saturday with Halloween being on Wednesday but by Tuesday morning the pumpkins had wilted and were completely rotted. When I touched Anna's pumpkin, the whole thing collapsed and went as flat as a pancake. So Tuesday morning they all went in the trash. I have a feeling next year we won't even bother with decorating pumpkins. On Halloween night, Anna wanted to go to Wednesday night church which was still meeting despite it being Halloween. She was only one of a small handful of kids that went but she had a blast. While she was there Michael and I took the boys out to eat and spent some time with them. Before we knew it, the night was over and we woke up to November 1st! Now the fun begins! The countdown to Thanksgiving, our oldest son's 14th Birthday, and of course Christmas! I love the excitement of the next 2 months! I'll leave you with a few pictures of our Fall festivities including Firefall at our church a few weeks back.

We sort of forgot to have Anna take her shoes off before going down the slide. I love the look on her face, it's pure joy!

 Pumpkin carving day.

 Our thinker trying to figure out what he wanted to do. Camden is in the background working on his design. I'll have to download my iPhone photos to show the completed pumpkins.

 I love the Fall shadows cast upon our house at sunset.

Happy November everybody!