{"id":17699,"date":"2024-12-17T15:47:55","date_gmt":"2024-12-17T23:47:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/?p=17699"},"modified":"2024-12-17T15:47:55","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T23:47:55","slug":"halloween-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/2024\/12\/halloween-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Halloween 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>November flew by, in the best way possible, I had a couple trips, spent time with family, and made a lot of progress on projects at work. It was a little jarring to discover that now, in mid-December, I hadn&#8217;t yet writtern about Halloween!<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve written about before, Halloween is my favorite holiday. We decorate a bit, and do family costumes (while the kids are young enough to tolerate it, hah!). This year, our family costume theme was decided by an exchange between MJ and Aaron:<\/p>\n<p>Aaron: Dada, I want to be Darth Vader.<br \/>\nMJ: Oh, for Halloween?<br \/>\nAaron: No, I want to BE Darth Vader.<br \/>\nMJ: &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Well, we can&#8217;t fulfill all of Aaron&#8217;s bad guy fantasies (ahem), but we could at least let him dress up as Darth Vader for Halloween, and have the rest of us follow. Adam was Obi-Wan Kenobi, MJ was the Emperor, and I was Princess Leia.<\/p>\n<p>Event-wise, the big one we did with the boys was at Adam&#8217;s elementary school, where they had various games and activities, along with a fire truck.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_school.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_school_sm.jpg\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>We also got them a pair of light sabers to go with their costumes, which they enjoyed walking around the neighborhood with before Halloween as we visited the local Halloween lights.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/neighborhood_lightsabers.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/neighborhood_lightsabers_sm.jpg\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>The day before Halloween we carved pumpkins, during which I just went with carving a single pumpkin with a very classic design. It had been a pretty busy autumn and I wasn&#8217;t feeling as creative as usual, and I had a feeling that the boys would lose interest once we got deep into pumpkin creation (they did). Thankfully, our au pair and former au pair were more creative than I.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_pumpkin_design.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_pumpkin_design_sm.jpg\"><\/a> <a href=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_pumpkin_carving.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_pumpkin_carving_sm.jpg\"><\/a><\/div>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_pumpkins.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_pumpkins_sm.jpg\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>The evening of Halloween was our biggest adventure yet! In previous years we&#8217;d only gone down our own street, but this year we added the street parallel to ours after noticing it was still early enough and the boys were bundles of energy.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_trick-or-treating.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_trick-or-treating_sm.jpg\"><\/a> <a href=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_trick-or-treating_table.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_trick-or-treating_table_sm.jpg\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>Our au pair (dressed as Padme) and our former au pair (dressed as Rei) joined us for the trick-or-treating festivities.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_group.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/journalpics\/122024\/halloween_2024_group_sm.jpg\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>Many thanks to the passerby who snapped our photo, I hope your kids took some extra candy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>November flew by, in the best way possible, I had a couple trips, spent time with family, and made a lot of progress on projects at work. It was a little jarring to discover that now, in mid-December, I hadn&#8217;t yet writtern about Halloween! As I&#8217;ve written about before, Halloween is my favorite holiday. We [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,41,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-kids","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17699"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17701,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17699\/revisions\/17701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}