Halloween!

Oy! I'm exhausted! But we had a GREAT time this Halloween. We started out with a trip to my work for a Halloween potluck and some trick or treating. Then we had a little party with the kids' babysitter and the other kids she watches. On Saturday, a big party with our home daycare group and another that she partners with followed by our goddaughter's birthday party with a costume theme. Finally, on Saturday we had a nice morning at church followed by a party with dear friends. Here are are a few pictures of the weekend.

The kids dressed up for church. Emie's dress reminded me of candy corn and made me happy.

Nathan and his daycare buddies. He dressed as Handy Manny and enjoyed fixing things for people all weekend long. I was relieved that he liked his costume because he's been telling everyone for the past several weeks that he was going to be Santa for Halloween.

Emie dressed as a sock monkey, which was Nathan's costume last year.

We fit in some trick or treating too. It was hard to get a good shot of Nathan. He was on a candy mission!

What a cute little tail!

Emie is such a big girl now, isn't she?

And here is our award winning pumpkin! There was a pumpkin decorating contest at the daycare party. We made a McDonald's Hamburger pumpkin and we won! I was hoping the prize was a month of free daycare, but alas it was a movie night basket instead.

A simple apple dip

Kids just love to dip! At least mine do. We've had a lot of apples around our house lately, so I made up a simple apple dip recipe (if you can call it that!) which has become a staple at morning snack time. Just mix plain yogurt (I use Greek for extra protein), peanut butter and a few drops of honey. Definitely healthier than that caramel stuff and a kid pleaser for sure! You can even throw in some ground flax seed for some Omega 3s and fiber.

Our little Emie is, well, little. So we need to bulk her up a bit. If anyone has any good recipes for healthy, high calorie toddler food, I'd appreciate you passing them my way!

Pumpkin patch

We have had unseasonably warm weather here lately. Today was cooler, but still a lovely 65 degree day. Knowing what is coming, I've been taking every opportunity to get us out of the house and enjoy fresh air while we still can. Today we hit a local pumpkin patch.

And we ran . . .

and ran . . .

and ran . . .

and obliged Mommy with a pumpkin pic.

We also tried out our muscles on some pumpkin squats.

Maybe next year Emie!

Catching the running bug

Nathan ran his first ever race this morning. I ran the Morton Arboretum 5K and Nathan ran the 50 yard dash for 2 to 4 year olds.

He was pretty excited that he was #1 (all of the kids were #1 ;))

All morning, he was asking for his turn to run. I got a video of the race, but it was pretty poor as apparently, parents of 2-4 year olds can be a bit aggressive with their cheering. Nathan was very cute zigzagging all over the road, laughing the whole way.

I think he may have caught the running bug. We took a family walk after dinner and he opted to run rather than ride in the stroller.

Celebrating 7 years with segways

Gus and I celebrated our seven year wedding anniversary with a day to ourselves in downtown Chicago. We went out to breakfast, went on a three hour Segway tour of the city, went out to lunch and just walked around the city.

A great view of the skyline from Adler Planetarium

We rode around soldier field, which was a ton of fun as we could play around with our new Segway tricks.

It was so windy at Buckingham Fountain we had to lean pretty far to keep from blowing away from each other!

It was a great way to cover a lot of ground quickly, see the city in a unique way and very fun!
We don't really go out very often without our kids, so it was a really nice chance to spend some 1:1 time.