Halloween Festivities 2011

I just realized that I had put some pictures of our Halloween festivites up on facebook for some family to see, but never blogged about it!  


We had a fun, busy and stressful at times Halloween season this year.  I had 2 carnivals within 4 days of each other -one was a multi-stake priest/laurel one that our stake was in charge of so the laurel leaders helped out and the other was our ward Halloween carnival that the Laurels were in charge of putting on for the primary kids, with the enlisted help of the rest of the youth in the ward.  It was a busy month full of planning and running around to various stores! Both were a little stressful but turned out great! Unfortunately since I was literally running around like crazy, I do not have any pictures of our boys at the carnival.  They did have fun though!  


Besides those 2 events, we were able to go to a great pumpkin patch for a preschool field trip, go to Tualatin's Giant Pumpkin Regatta races and festival, make some halloween sugar cookies, watch some scary movies and carve pumpkins with the Jensen's, go to the Children's Museum Boo party and of course, do some trick-or-treating Halloween night.  We were so pooped and done with Halloween by the end.  The boys absolutely loved it though, as you will see in the HUGE smiles from the pictures I was able to capture during the month:




LEE FARMS

Tualatin Common's Giant Pumpkin Regatta

Carving Pumpkins

Portland Children's Museum BOO PARTY

Halloween Night

September Camping at the Coast

We decided very last minute with some friends to go camping at the coast the weekend after labor day.  We were so lucky to get gorgeous and super warm weather in September this year and decided we couldn't pass up the opportunity after a crazy, not as fun as we hoped summer, to get out to the coast and enjoy some sunshine, nature and family time with good friends.  We love the Gardiner's! They are a blast.

The boys of course absolutely LOVE camping (making all their Daddy's dreams come true) and they had a great time digging in the sand at the coast and playing in the water.  We camped out at Cape Lookout Friday night and headed up Saturday afternoon (after a brief, but satisfying stop at the Cheese Factory for some cheese samples and delicious ice cream), to Oswald Park/Short Sands beach.  It was GORGEOUS.  We stayed until dark and ate BBQ beef sandwiches in the parking lot before finally giving in to the fun and relaxing weekend and headed back in to Portland.  It was a really nice and much needed little get away, and was our first trip with our new Sequoia... and it definitely passed the test.  Now for the pictures:

 My goofy little boys.  We set up most of the campsite and good food (seriously, we ate some good camp food!) around the Gardiner's site... hence the bare table and campsite shown here.

Saturday morning at Cape Lookout campsite beach... it was pretty foggy most of the morning.

It was an 80 degree, beautiful day a few miles up at Short Sands beach

From inside a cool cave on the beach we found

Here's John pulling the boys on the boogie board through the water.... they thought it was so much fun... Jackson has no fear of the water.  I love it.

 Jackson insisted we burry him in the sand... I was happy to oblige.

 Our little Missionary/Gumby

 This was as far as Bear was willing to be buried.

 Jackson found a stick and loved drawing pictures and his name in the sand

Gorgeous sunset- this one just might end up on our wall at home.

The man that Brittany made

Goodbye gorgeous, beautiful beach... thank you for a wonderful day!

Oaks Park

The company I work for has their annual company picnic every year at Oak Amusement Park in Portland.... it's the only amusement park in Oregon (well closest thing to an amusement park- it's no where near the CA ones).  The company serves tons of great food, does some fun games for the kids, has free face painting and gives everyone free passes to all the rides! It's great! I really like the company we work for. They are very organized and on top of everything, and treat their employees pretty good.  Anyways, the boys always have a great time when we go to Oaks Park and had a blast again this year.  

 There was candy and coins inside of the hay for the kids to find.... Jackson came away with $5 in addition to lots of candy!

We sat and watched this ride for a little while... the boys thought it was awesome. I will not be going on that anytime soon.

A funny note from the day.... on all the little kid rides Baron would just sit there happily, or stick his tongue out, but never break out in a big smile.  We kept wondering if he liked the rides, but he said he did and wanted to keep going on them over and over.  It wasn't until we went on the mini roller coaster that he finally broke out in a HUGE grin.  Turns out he's really just a little dare devil who prefers the bigger, scarier rides.  When we took Jackson last year on the roller coaster, he cried.  This year Jackson loved it, and Baron (this year was his first year being tall enough for it) couldn't get enough of it and wanted to go again and again.  We had a great day!