Fall

So I have decided that next to celebrating Christmas, fall & Halloween rank second on my list. I love to see the leaves change from the greens to the vibrant yellows, oranges and especially reds. I also love to watch football games, but we won't go into how desperate Jake & I are to actually see BYU play now. (That has to be the biggest downside of moving here.) I also love to feel the temperature drop a little bit so that its bearable to be outside. What I have found though is that Halloween is especially fun with Jake & Elisabeth.

This year Elisabeth semi-started to figure out what tricking or treating is. I went to the ward Trunk or Treat with Grandma and Grandpa Ellinger. It was great because as we went around Mom introduced me to a lot of people in the ward. I'm not great with names and I've already forgotten half of them, however, it was nice to get to know a few people. Elisabeth and I practiced saying trick or treat before going to daycare in the morning and then after I picked her up as well when work was over. She was a pro at saying it, but this year everything seemed more real to her and I think that she was afraid of some of the people in costumes. However, after figuring out that candy was involved she would race from car to car timidly saying the infamous phrase. People adored her as Elmo and several requested having their pictures taken with her! She was such a cutie pie! After the ward trunk or treat was over, Jake came home from class at UVSC and then we went to see Kayden & Carlee (Elisabeth's best friends). Tammy & Ben invited us in and we ate soup with Tammy's family and then went trick or treating around the block afterwards with Kayden & Elisabeth. Elisabeth loved the idea of going from door to door and seemed to be more interested in that than the candy. Last night is one of the reasons I like being a parent. It was so much fun to see Elisabeth enjoying Halloween!

Jake has also become quite a character dressing up this year. He is trying his best to have people like him at school and so he is going out of his way to go overboard in everything that he is involved in. In September he was asked to come dressed like his favorite character from a book. He mulled over it for a while and decided that he wanted to dress up like Aslan the Lion from C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Everyone in the school was asked to dress up, but no one came as prepared as Jake! We rented a lion costume from Taylor Maid and he was such a great lion. The kids absolutely adored his costume! Since he had such a good response from dressing up as a lion, he decided for Halloween that he would dress up as an Ipod. We found the box that Mom's wheelchair came in from the garage and then wrapped white, black, and pink paper around it to fashion what an Ipod should look like. Even before Jake told his class what he was, the kids already had figured it out. One kid even asked if he could buy the costume from Jake! Jake is having a good time teaching; even if it is wearing him out to the brink of exhaustion!

I was remembering what my Halloween's were like as a kid and its not what I wore that I could remember. I remembered how cool it was when Janice and I were in the "pre" teen stage to hide our Halloween candy around our bedroom like Claudia from The Babysitters Club. We would hide it and then forget where we had put some of it until months later. If we would have been a little smarter, we would have realized that all of our forgotten candy is what attracted more "friends" into our bedroom. If mom had known how much candy we had hidden in our room, she would have been pretty upset with us over the increasing rodent problem!

I've included some pictures of our adventures this fall from going to the pumpkin patch to Halloween. I hope you enjoy!

-Steph