This Minivan Life

I knew when we had a cute little girl that she would like the same things her brothers liked, I just didn't know she would like this stuff as much! Grace loves superheroes and legos... neither of which are age appropriate. Zach lined up all his toys and this is what Gracie did.   Notice the really small toys on the end... that's what she wanted.   These are what she was reaching for. She can remove their heads, mix and match helmets, and almost always thinks the lego guys should have weapons. The boys HATE that she loves legos.

I love pie, like maybe an unhealthy amount.  While my parents were here, they wanted to take a drive out to the Texas Hill Country, and make a quick stop for Pie Hour.  Yeah, pie hour. You need to go.  We got to pie hour and I was shocked. Pie hour runs from 3-5pm, and it's at a tiny diner, in an even smaller town. The place was HOPPING at 3:08pm.  We tried several kinds of pie: cherry, pecan, German chocolate, coconut cream, and lemon cream. they were all wonderful.  If you like meringue pies, which we actually didn't try, this might be the place for you, the meringue was so high and it looked delicious!  No seriously see how high that meringue is.  We also had some dinner. Word to the wise, if you happen to order the chicken and dumplings at this place just know it is a bowl of dumplings and then a side of boiled chicken.

When I was a kid, we had a Halloween tradition of "pumpkin stew" on Halloween. It was basically just beef stew in a pumpkin, but we thought it was awesome. Since my mom was here for Halloween, we strongly encouraged her (read forced) to make pumpkin stew for Halloween.  We opted out of the pumpkin this year, and went for an orange pot instead. But! We decided to incorporate the book Stone Soup into our dinner. If you haven't read Stone Soup, you've been living under as stone (haha) and need to run to your local library.  This is the same (beat up) copy of Stone Soup we had as a kid, it was pretty fun to have Grammy read it to the kiddos. 

Since the Halloween costumes take so much planning... they need their own post.  When we planned these costumes, we wanted to make sure the kids wouldn't be too hot... this is usually an issue in texas, this year it so wasnt! We were scrambling to put long sleeved shirts and jackets on to go trick or treating!

Both boys got to dress up in costumes for Halloween, and BOTH boys decided to dress up like Harry Potter! Luckily they dressed up on different days.   Michael had a scar and some battle wounds, because Harry Potter gets pretty beat up as the series goes on.  Zach was so funny, he planned to dress up like a fireman or a knight... and then he decided, morning of, to go as Harry Potter.  He was pretty cute as Harry Potter, and SO proud that he wore Michael's prized costume.

It's no secret that we are a fan of Halloween at our house. I thought this might be the year that we had to give up the family themed costumes... wrong, we convinced the kids to go with it again.   This year we went with two dragons (one of them was a mean dragon and one was a "pet" dragon), knights, and a princess (with a sword). Brian outdid himself with the handmade swords.  We finally had a COLD Halloween. It was cold and rainy when we started trick or treating and the kids did NOT last long! We had to convince them to keep going, and even then we lasted maybe 45 minutes. I thought that would result in very little candy... nope, their buckets were FULL!  We took pictures the night before because the bad weather was rolling in and we knew that they wouldn't really want to take pictures on halloween itself.  The boys REALLY enjoyed fighting the dragons.  And fighting each other.

Harry Potter and a "yelling" pumpkin   We decided with Halloween so close we should carve some pumpkins. Every year we let the kids pick out the pumpkins and every year we trick ourselves into believing they are going to carve them... no. This year they told us vaguely what they wanted and skipped off to play. Brian carved and awesome Harry Potter and I carved a less awesome "yelling" pumpkin. The kids carved... nothing.  It was one of the rare cold(ish) fall days, and we decided some hot chocolate was a necessary. After all it was only 70 degrees in October, down right frigid! Zach spent most the pumpkin carving time trying to fish marshmallows out of his hot chocolate.  Brian carved out the inside of the pumpkins, yeah I've never seen a cleaner pumpkin either.  Zach thought the pumpkin guts were "disgusting" so he wore gloves.... to fish marshmallows out of hot chocolate.  Zach (and Mikey) drew designs on the pumpkins, shar