Halloween happens to be my favorite Holiday of the year! This even happens to be my favorite season! I love the crisp cool air at night, the cooler temps (if 75 degrees can be considered cool) and the beautiful fall colors, which you don’t see much of around here in SoCal. But where I grew up there was rolling hills of color as the trees went through their color changes. Oh what a beautiful site!
This month, the girls and I have been very busy with trips to Disneyland to visit their Halloween area and Haunted Mansion all done up in Nightmare Before Christmas. Of course we have been checking out the various pumpkin patches all around too. Oh, and who could forget trips to Rita’s Italian Ice for a nice Pumpkin Pie Ice and Starbucks for Pumpkin Spice Lattes! Mmmm so good…. I love anything with Pumpkin flavoring!
First off we LOVE going to Disneyland with all the pumpkins everywhere, but one of the best parts is going to the Halloween area! Mickey and his friends walk around while dressed up in their Halloween outfits, they have a little Halloween parade and show for the kids too. Most of the time we go there to Conjure up a Villain (We have only gotten Cruella DeVille and Jafar this year, bummer). Miss M likes doing that so much that she volunteered to do the conjuring! It was so cute seeing her up there while waving the magic wand around. She was so excited when Cruella came out (I was a little bummed since it was the 3rd time we saw her at that point). But it was for the experience more then anything.
The pumpkin patches are always great! We’ve been to a few of them before but they are just so fun. The first one that we went to was the Irvine Park Railroad. I personally think this one is kind of pricey but since we went with friends I put that aside. The girls had tons of fun in the hay maze, haunted house and with all the cut outs.
Miss M had a field trip with her Pre-School this month at the Tanaka Farms. It was a lot of fun, we’ve gone there for Strawberry picking and Watermelon picking. But this was our first Pumpkin picking tour that we did. I paid to have Miss S participate too. They had tons of fun petting the animals, picking veggies (4 carrots, 4 green beans, 4 radishes and 4 onions each) and then picking their pumpkins! Miss M picked a fun white pumpkin and Miss S picked a super cute little orange pumpkin.
The next one that we went to is one of our favorites, The Great Park. In previous years they had it on one Saturday before Halloween. But since they are developing that area they made it every Saturday of the month! This I thought was awesome because it seemed to cut down on the amount of people that participated (you had to per-register for the event). While the kids had fun walking around trick-or-treating, doing crafts and playing games, Mr F and I felt a little disappointing by how they had the pumpkins laid out. Instead of having them in their growing rows they had them all bunched up into rectangular rows. Kind of took the whole pumpkin patch feel away from it. It order to participate in the trick-or-treating and pumpkin patch each kid had to bring in 5 non-perishable foods for the food bank. This of course is an awesome deal!
The last Halloween event that we did was Santa Ana’s Boo at the Zoo. We have done this for a few years now. The girls love being able to see the porcupine awake and walking around at night. Unfortunately, he wasn’t out this year so the girls were a little disappointed by that. But they did get to take a try at milking a cow in the dairy barn. It was a fake cow, but still they get the idea of how to do it. We were a little disappointed by the lack of stuff that this year had (they are doing a lot of new builds and renovations so I can see why they would cut down on the stuff this year) but the girls did get a cute little Wreck-it Ralph stuffed animal on the way out. She is one of the racers from Sugar Rush… and she smells like grapes! MMMmmm
Miss M’s pre-school class took place on Halloween so they had a cute little Halloween party with all the kids dressed up in their costumes. To start the party off the kids walked to the corner of the street and tried to get the cars that drove by to honk. It was so cute seeing them all walking around in their costumes. The parents all brought in treats, snacks and drinks for the kids to much on. Even little Miss S got to have some!
Now we are finally to Trick-or-Treating! We had some friends come over to go around our neighborhood with us. Our neighborhood is mostly older families so there isn’t that many kids that go around. So, when our crew came around people were very excited! Since the parents were dressed up to, we even got candy! Right when we started to head back to my house it started to sprinkle! That is a very rare thing down here in SoCal… I was happy that it was raining but why couldn’t it have come on another night! One night when we are actually doing something, it decides to come. Lucky for us though it was only sprinkling… it didn’t start down pouring until around 1 o’clock in the morning.
We had a very fun filled October as you can see! Hope yours was just as good! Feel free to share your Halloween costumes with me, I would love to see them!
Crafting Mommy of Three 