Halloween, All Saints, All Souls, Rabbit... and Baby Number 5!

Quite the week in our little household, I will say.

First, we got ready for Halloween.  Henry used Starfall.com's pumpkin maker to design our pumpkin this year and I did my best to faithfully render his choice.

I'm pretty sure this is almost identical to the one he chose last year.  Maybe the nose is different.  For whatever reason, he thinks these eyes and mouth are the spookiest.

Halloween itself was very exciting.  Matt took Henry and Oliver trick'or'treating with some friends in the neighborhood while Jane and I passed out candy to the crowds.  And there were some serious crowds!  We had huge groups of kids come all at once with big gaps in between.  It was kind of strange, but efficient.  We ran out of candy after only two hours, but Henry and Oliver came back with a wagon-load of their own.

Oliver was Superman, Henry was a skeleton, and Jane had on a tutu.  We had some fairy wings for her, but she opted not to wear them.

Finished!

Our All Saints' Day pretzels came out great.  I used this Good Eats recipe, but divided the dough into 16 pieces and formed figure 8s.  These were seriously the best soft pretzels ever.  I can tell I'll be making these again.


On All Souls' Day, we remembered our family members who have passed away: my parents, my husband's mother, and our first little boy, Evan, who died when he was eight months old, just four months before Henry was born.

We looked at their pictures, said prayers for them, and talked about our lesson from last week, After Death there is Life.

We also said prayers for all our other family members and friends who have passed away, as well as the poor souls who have no one to pray for them.

Things Oliver said this week: fly, brothers, good job, Halloween, and up!

Henry's art lesson for this week was a rabbit.  The humor of this is significant because...

We are expecting our fifth child!  It's funny to think about it, but I've been pregnant for at least part of every year since 2006.  I'm due mid-June, so it was a bit of a relief to realize that we'll have this school year wrapped up by the first week of June.

If everything goes well, we'll have a couple of months to settle our newest member in before beginning kindergarten in the fall.  And, this time around, we've decided to not find out the baby's sex until it's born.  At this point, we have plenty of stuff for either a boy or a girl, so I think it will be fun to wait for the surprise.