Things to Do - Halloween & Random Links

Is it just me or did Halloween seem more more than a marathon than a sprint this year? Friday we marched in the grade school Halloween parade. After which we took seven girls to see Goosebumps for F's 10th birthday party, followed by a sleepover.

Saturday was a whirlwind of soccer games, after which I photographed our amazing friends dressing up as a family of Avengers (so so cool, click here to see the pics).

Then happy hours and trick or treating. I fell asleep at 9:30, while the girls counted their candy and Dan played poker with several neighborhood dads in our man cave/shed/backyard party room, thinking to myself "how are you all not exhausted by now?"





On the upside, our neighborhood was hopping and it was rather nice to see how many young families have moved in recently. Plus, every year for Halloween costumes I offer the kids the option of a trip to Party City (where they have to spend their allowance on most of the costume) or using their imagination for DIY ideas with stuff we already own. And this year they turned into an old man, cowgirl, and fortune teller without any extra help (with the exception of a few accessories from Amazon and a loaned cowboy hat). I wish I had more photos, but by the time I gathered my kids together the sun had set and I was grasping for any remnant of the fading light.

Anyways, HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE!!! Hopefully this weekend will prove more mellow, though we have P's birthday party/sleepover tonight, so it seems like life keeps going at full speed. Oh well, soon December, right?





RANDOM LINKS:

* Healthy pumpkin pie smoothies. These look yummy!

* 16 read aloud HOLIDAY chapter books the whole family will enjoy. Pretty excited about this!!

* I want this poster, I'm just not sure where to put it in our house.

* A new Miss Moss mixtape. Yay!!

* I'm a little enamored with this essay on travel and photography, though which I learned about Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel poem, which I can't stop reading over and over again.

* A perfect weather year-long roadtrip of the United States. I now have a retirement plan (just not any retirement money).

* 12 fairy tale places that are actually real. Wow. I'm trying to avoid wanderlust for awhile, but I can't seem to stop.

* No one wants to be the snack mom. Hysterical and true.

* What American immigrants looked like when they arrived from Ellis Island.

* Oh Taylor, sometimes you're just so good at what you do.

* The effect of her being - love these photographs of a mother's everyday moments.

* The year's best documentaries.

* A desert full of flowers.

* Holly Andres's adolescent fairy tales. "Holly Andres’s photo series seem to unfold in the darkened corners of a fairy-tale dream space—a place where the private lives of girls intersect with the mysteries, and occasional dangers, of the adult world. The stories she tells—in lush, cinematic scope, like movies made up of only still images—are often drawn from stories in her own childhood: the adventures of a group of adolescent girls hungry for new experience; the trauma of two young sisters who venture too close to a hornet’s nest. Her latest series, “The Fallen Fawn,” which will go on display at the Robert Mann Gallery on October 29th, tells the story of two sisters who discover a woman’s abandoned suitcase by a river behind their house. Treating it as a valuable treasure, they bring it home, hide it underneath the bed, and secretly dress up in the “mystery woman’s” belongings at night. In this story, as in her other work, the young protagonists project both the plucky curiosity of Nancy Drew and the fragile innocence of a sleeping Snow White."

* What is an ideal childhood?