Halloween

This year for Halloween we finally executed a costume I've been wanting to do for a very long time - Mary Poppins!  I've been dreaming of having us dress up as Jolly Holiday Mary and Bert for years.  I even bought some penguin waiter costumes a few years ago when they were on clearance on DisneyStore.com.  I finally decided this year was the year to do it.  Melanie probably won't let me decide what she's going to dress up as for too much longer and I'm not pregnant (and therefore can fit in the Mary Poppins costume) so we went for it!  I had to make a penguin costume for Amelia and bought a white jacket to paint for Matt's costume, but other than that everything we wore was store bought stuff I pieced together to make the costumes.

We did a test run of our costumes on Sunday when we went to Matt's parents house for his birthday dinner.  His sister and her fiance' weren't going to be in town on Halloween evening, so we decided to give them a chance to see our family all decked out.

Melanie got to wear her costume to school the next day for a costume parade.  Here she is with her friend, Jillian, who was dressed as a cute little mouse.

Sadly, this is about the happiest picture we have of her in her costume.  She really did like it, but she was so worn out by the time we started taking other pictures later in the day it was pretty tough to get her to smile.

Melanie taking her turn telling everyone what she was dressed as.

Later in the afternoon we started our annual trek around town to show the girls' costumes to family. 

We started off with visiting Uncle John at his office downtown, where the girls were encouraged to trick-or-treat at the various cubicles.  The girls thought it was really fun, I (and I'm assuming Matt) felt a bit silly walking around an office full of people we didn't know in our costumes.  Everyone seemed to really like our costume idea though, so that helped temper my feelings of silliness a bit.

Two penguins with Uncle John

*side note - parking garages are distracting places to try and take pictures, in case you were planning on using one as your next location for family photos*

"Bert" wearing sunglasses and driving a minivan.  Carousel horses are so 1910.

Happy penguins!

Going to visit Granny Em.  I'm pretty sure Matt was pleased to get to use his cane to ring the doorbell.  When we left he tried to use it to open the van door.  That didn't work quite as well.

The girls with Granny Em

The littlest penguin raiding GG Palmer's candy basket

For being the one that couldn't eat any of the candy she sure seemed to enjoy it the most!

Our penguins with GG Palmer

Happy baby :)

Hanging out with Great Grandma and Great Grandpa Greenlee

Melanie and Claire were getting warm and we were heading home after this to grab a bite to eat for dinner, so we let them take their costumes off.

This is the happiest she's been in her car seat for quite a while.  Maybe I should dress her as a penguin more often!

The littlest penguin with her godmother, Aunt Amber

Blue socks!
Even though nobody would know about them unless Matt showed them on purpose it still made me smile to know they were there helping complete the costume in my mind.

The girls' facial expressions really crack me up in this one.

As the evening wore on and they got tired Melanie became more impatient and Claire became more manic.  And as one friend said, Amelia looks like The Godfather.

This was the best picture we were able to get with Nana McHugh

Grams and Gramps gave each of the girls a book for their Trick-or_Treating treat.  They immediately sat down and started checking out their newest literary treasure.  I'm so glad they love books so much!

After we had seen all of our family we went to Trick-or-Treat at four neighbors houses and then came home to pass out candy, which is just about as much fun for our girls as going door to door in their opinion!  We eventually had to tell them they could hand out candy to 10 more kids and then they were done for the evening.  We capped the night off by reading their new books for their bedtime story and they were sawing logs in no time.  Overall a great candy day indeed!

Happy Halloween!