Tricks and Treats

It was a treat when Jadyn decided to be Princess Belle from Beauty and the Beast. First of all after wavering between several costumes last year, this year once she chose her costume she stuck with it. Second of all, out of all the Disney princesses, I felt she most resembles Belle because of her beautiful brunette hair.

However, the trick was getting her hair to actually look as good as Princess Belle. Not an easy task considering how uncoordinated I am doing other people's hair. I am the one that still does not know how to braid, let alone French braid so getting a poof/bun was not something I was looking forward to. A quick search of some hair blogs led me to this style and after two days of practicing and pulling poor Jadyn's hair every which way, I finally got it!

So here is Jadyn on Day One of Princess Belle for her preschool Halloween party - her third annual as she went to the last two years of Jake's preschool parties:

Here she is enjoying the party with her buddy Hayden and her friend Stephanie, both of whom have older brothers that were good friends of Jake when he was in preschool (Gavin and Chris):



It was a real trick helping Jake decide what he was going to be for Halloween this year. He scoffed at every suggestion I made, insisting that he only wanted to be Dale Jr. again, which is what he dressed up as last year. While most moms would be happy to save the time and money on getting him a new costume, I was secretly disappointed that he wanted to be the same thing over again.

So it was a real treat when I finally convinced him to dress up as something different. He was really interested in several characters from Star Wars, but I was afraid a mask would not go over so well so we finally decided on Anakin Skywalker.

Things go tricky again when on Thursday Jake came home from school declaring that he felt yucky. He then proceeded to fall asleep at 6:30pm that evening and not wake up until the following morning, something he has NEVER done. Sure enough, he was running a low grade fever and was not able to attend the final day of Red Ribbon Week at school, which was Pajama Day since the school district does not allow Halloween costumes at school.

But it was a real treat that while we felt for sure our Halloween weekend was ruined, Jake's temperature subsided by that afternoon and he was feeling much better. So much so, that we were still able to attend the first Annual Truck-or-Treat event at Jake's school. We participated by decorating our vehicle and passing out candy. I passed out the candy while Joe took the kids around to the other cars:

A personal favorite:

And after keeping things fairly low-key on Saturday and missing the chance to celebrate with cousins Madison and Ethan, we were still able to take the kids trick-or-treating on Saturday evening and they had a blast! The trick at this point was trying to keep up motivation to curl and manipulate Jadyn's hair for a third and final time.

It was a real treat to see my little girlie-girl INSIST on wearing her high heel Belle dress-up shoes for the entire trek around the neighborhood we take them to, even after Joe tried to convince her to wear tennis shoes on TWO separate occasions. I was so proud of her.

And it was also such a treat to see Jake, his usual sweet and thoughtful self, guiding his little sister up to each house and back to the car after they had trick-or-treated to their hearts content.

But the final treat, was seeing these two smiling, shining, happy faces as they hung off the monkey bars at the playground afterwards.

A perfect end to yet another great Halloween that was full of more treats than tricks