Wow, what a weekend! It started with the school Halloween Parade and Fiesta on Friday. Costumes, games, friends, and CANDY!!! 









Plus, Colin's Cub Scouts had their Raingutter Regatta that same night. We scrambled to finish his racer, but it seem to float okay. Anyway, only three of them from their den showed up and he took 3rd Place out of the three. :) And he even won one of the races. When asked what his favorite part was of the evening, he said the boat race: "...because I tried my best and had fun."



Checking in his boat.



Working on "Responsibility" word search while waiting for the races.

 

The winning race. :)

SO PROUD!!! :)

Tiger Cub Scouts



"I vant to eat a donut...mwahaha...."

 We celebrated my grandma's birthday today. Her birthday is actually tomorrow, but my cousin is in town for an internship and was staying with my parents for the weekend. We all met after mass for some yummy Filipino food to wish Grandma many more happy, happy birthdays. :)




Made this storm troopers shirt based on this awesome one.

 



Happiness is halo-halo at Salo-Salo. :)





Turon Delight with ube ice cream






Grandma and Grandpa with cousin Brigette





The fam. My eyes are closed. Great.





Hanging out at home before trick or treating



And finally, some shots from our evening of tricks and treats. We started out at a local church for their Trunk or Treat and Colin snagged some great loot. Then headed back to our neighborhood to check it out for the first time. We hit about 5 or so homes before Colin was ready to head back to hand out some candy of his own. We were pleasantly surprised that we actually got some trick or treaters, considering we have no sidewalk on our side of the road and most of the houses on our street had their lights out. We handed out candy for about a couple of hours before we turned our front light out. All in all, we had maybe 10 or so groups come by.



Don't mind our ghetto-fabulous mailbox. ;)





Trunk or Treat





Couldn't pass up a storm trooper!



Savoring the loot.

Hope your Halloween was as fun as ours was!! :)

I MADE THIS!!! :) Well, yes, I made that cute little boy with the bowl haircut, too, but I was talking about the cape. ;)

And I am ecstatic that it actually looks like what I wanted it to look like! I have a very hard time buying the cheap and flimsy costumes out there, but I have done it for the past few years and decided it was time to step it up a bit. It took a bit of convincing to get Colin to abandon his dreams of a Boba Fett costume, but in the end, he became excited about the whole bloody vampire concept.

At first, I hemmed and hawed over whether or not I should drop the cash on a cape pattern. After all, I am no seamstress. It seemed like it was going to be fairly easy to figure out, though, so I finally decided to wing it. Hey--I'm a visual person. And pretty crafty. Hmmm....but how in the world was I going to get that collar to stay up? And how do I attach it to the rest of the darned cape? I read about fusible interfacing and decided to use that for the collar. I found a large enough remnant of very thick Pellon at Joann's and paid $0.50 for it! The black satin was 1/2 off and the red satin was a large, deconstructed shawl I found at a thrift store for $3! I also found the rest of his costume at the same thrift store--tuxedo tails complete with dress shirt for $6.50, and a large lion head brooch with "jewel" which I'll make into a medallion. For less than $20, he'll have a custom vampire costume to show off at the Halloween Festival this Friday! :) Go me! Now back to bed........

Remember the Festival Madness? We also threw in a little Cub Scouts outing on that Saturday morning, bright and early at 7:30. Colin was late in registering, so didn't have his uniform yet, but we made it out to the pumpkin patch and joined up with one of his buddies. There was plenty more to do that day, so we picked up a few pumpkins and enjoyed a pancake breakfast before heading back home to re-energize. It was a lovely, overcast morning. :)

Maybe we'll cut ours from the vine next year...

The kids enjoying the romp through the field.

My Pumpkin.

Ever since I can remember, the school "Octoberfest" was a HUGE deal. Games. Rides. FOOD. I remember my mom and my aunt cooking up ginormous batches of fried rice for the Filipino Food Booth. Lots of garlic, diced carrots, peas, onions, and rice, rice, baby.

Enter the 2nd generation of Octoberfest, now "Festival", madness. I'm thrilled that I get to send Colin to the same school I went to. It is such an awesome feeling to walk on campus and feel like I'm back home. And Festival is just as huge as it was when I was growing up. Now that Rob and I are fully fledged members of the Filipino Association at the school, we've racked up more service hours in one weekend than we did all last year thanks to the Filipino Booth. Including prep on Thursday and Friday, that's 47 hours combined! We had to skip out on a lot of the food prep, but worked our butts off setting up tables, chairs, signs, filling orders, and selling, selling, selling. Thankfully, many people still made it out despite the unusually wet and drizzly weather and we netted a great profit from our booth alone.




And if helping out with the booth weren't enough, we were running around with Colin as he practiced and performed with other students from Grades 1-8 in their version of Michael Jackson's "Thriller". They performed on Saturday and at Sunday's talent show and have now been asked to perform for the school pep rally next Friday. The kids are amazing. And Mama is SO proud of her mini-Thespian!!! :)







Rob and I reserved Saturday as a day off from the food booth so we could enjoy the Festival as a family. So after Thriller that first day, we walked around with Colin and played some games and rode some rides. That is, until Mom wanted to hurl after "The Flamethrower" (I ain't as young and resilient as I used to be, apparently). In which case, I hijacked the car keys and slept it off in the parking lot while the boys spent some more ride tickets.










Needless to say, all three of us were pretty much zombies on Monday morning. It's taken a while, but I think I'm almost fully recovered (finally). Colin made it through the week just fine. Even Rob is alert, lol.

Here's to Festival: Year Two. Just seven more years to go (yikes)!! Thank God it only comes around once a year!

Oh, happy Monday. There’s nothing like a whirlwind weekend that makes you hate Monday all that much more. Especially when you have to work on a perfectly good Columbus Day!


Here’s the weekend re-cap:


The wedding on Saturday was great. Colin enjoyed seeing his cousins and running around with them all night during the reception. Poor kid had laryngitis by the end of the evening and woke up with a major cold, though. :( We adults had a good time, too. I think one of the major highlights of the reception was the photo booth by All Star Photo Booth, complete with all kinds of goofy and colorful props. The kids couldn’t get enough of it! And guess what? I even got my folks in there with Colin to snap some crazy fun smiles. They were totally into it!! Haha….well, the pictures tell all:














We all made it home safely and turned in after the long, eventful day. Rubbed a little Vicks on my sick baby and kissed him goodnight. He. Was. Out. And so were we.




Sunday morning came much too quickly. I had a morning photo session, so I got up early to prepare and get in the right frame of mind [read: awake and conscious]. It was shaping up to be warm day by the time I left the house, but we survived the heat and the bugs that were out in full force. I actually survived, unscathed by nary a bug bite!! The last outdoor session left me in Urgent Care with an infected spider bite and a scrip for antibiotics. Can I help it if I’m just that yummy?! ;)


I just couldn’t wait to get home to the hubs and my sick boy. I called them after the session and told them I was stuck in a parking lot on the 10 Freeway—didn’t know how long I would be. We literally did not move for at least a minute—not even an inch. So I had time to snap a little evidence. Don’t worry—I don’t normally do this while driving, but it wasn’t like we were going anywhere:




Finally made it home. My self-sufficient men had already devoured a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. I even had one myself for lunch. With sliced tomatoes—yum! The rest of the afternoon was spent running errands with my boys, picking up stuff for Halloween and getting ready for our Pumpkin Carving Party at the end of the month. Once Colin was asleep, I finished assembling the invitations to the party. Now just a few last minute touches on that, and they’ll be ready to go:




Midnight comes far too fast at our house. And Monday morning comes even faster, it seems. Here’s to what will probably be the busiest, most stressful week I’ve had in a few months. But I’m always up for a challenge—that’s what adrenaline is for, right? ;)