Alm Adventures: Raking Leaves and Halloween

I combined two sets of pictures in the slide show below, leaf raking and then Halloween, so I'll post about both here. On Thursday, the girls and I spent two hours in the yard raking leaves. I have not had to rake leaves in SO long. I forgot what a workout it can be! Last year in Georgia, we only had two little trees. Not too bad. Before that, I hadn't raked since I moved out of my parents house, 13 years ago. Now ask me about my tortured youth, that's a different story. We lived in a woods. A woods! And we had to rake our giant expanse of a wooded yard. It took us days and days. Maybe I just imagine that it was such a humongous task, but it felt like we never stopped raking. Anyway...back to the present...the kids had a wonderful time playing in the leaves while I worked. If you look at the pictures you'll see Emily crying in the leaves. I swear she was having fun and then nap time hit her like a train and she was DONE. Anyway, it was good to have some outdoor time. We're taking advantage of the nice days here. We know they are numbered.

Yesterday was beautiful. After seeing a little bit of snow and ice here on 2 days last week, I fully anticipated that the girls would have to trick or treat in their winter coats. Not so. We welcomed Halloween with the sun...and almost 65 degrees. Of course, the evening was cooler, but still very nice. Ava was totally psyched for the holiday. She could not wait to go trick or treating with her good friend Anna. We met up with our friends, Dave and Staycie and their kids and then some of their friends joined us with their 4 children. We were like a Halloween parade as we trick or treated through the neighborhood.

Emily was totally content to cruise along in the stroller and watch everything that was going on. I wonder what she thought about what she was seeing. Everyone in costume, ringing the doorbells of strangers. Hmmm. In honor of her first Halloween, Emily did try to consume our jack-o-lantern yesterday. I took a phone call and after a few minutes of conversation, I noted that Emily was no longer at my feet. I tracked her down around the corner eating our pumpkin. I took a little video clip, it's in the show below. Sorry for the shaky filmography, I was trying to keep the pumpkin pieces out of her mouth and kept losing my subject in the lense.

Here you go...pictures of leaf raking and Sleeping Beauty and the Scarecrow on Halloween.