It's Gettin' Hot in Here

Gwen decided that she wanted to be a firefighter for Halloween. We decided to do a family theme, so Rick and I were burn victims. We were only mildly burned since Gwen is such a heroic fire fighter and saved us in plenty of time. :)

The preparation for these costumes was even more fun than we thought it would be. The night before the ward Halloween party, Rick and I brought some old clothes out to the back patio and started burning them up. It look longer than we thought and boy did it smell bad. We put them in the garage for the night, and the next day, the smell was unbearable. We threw the clothes in the wash, hoping they would still be in one piece. Other than some of the ashes being washed off, they still looked pretty good.

They were also having a chili cook-off for the party. I considered making chili from scratch, but I was just too tired. We opened up 6 cans of chili, threw it in the crock pot, and called it good.

Gwen actually took a nap on the day of the party, so Rick and I got dressed and ready to go while she slept. She was sleeping extra long so we had to go wake her up. Bad idea.

Gwen did not like our costumes at all and it took us about a half hour to even convince her to go to the party with us. She kept telling us she didn't like them and to take them off.

Once we told her she could have a band-aid that matched Mommy's she finally conceded. We threw the chili in the trunk and headed on our way. But first, we had our neighbor take our photo...




About three minutes into the drive, as Rick was taking a corner too fast, we heard a noise that nobody wants to hear when there is a pot full of chili in the trunk.

We pulled over immediately on the side of a busy street to survey the damage and do what we could to prevent the mess from getting any worse. There wasn't much we could do at that point, but we at least picked up the excess chili and threw it out on the side of the road. A jogger ran past and we could hear him snickering. Apparently he has never seen two burned people throwing chili on the side of the road. We couldn't help laughing either.

We drove back home and cleaned up as much as we could. I was still giggling, but I don' t think Rick thought it was very funny. I was just glad that I didn't go to the trouble of making chili from scratch. My one regret is that we didn't take a photo of the mess. I asked Rick to recreate it for the sake of the blog, but for some reason I couldn't get a lot of cooperation on that one.

We headed back to the party and figured we could just clean up the rest of the mess when we got home. They had just started serving dinner and as I stood there with my bowl, surveying the table full of chili. Somehow, my pregnant stomach couldn't handle the thought of eating chili after spending the last 30 minutes scrubbing it from the upholstery.

After dinner, they did a little costume parade- having the kids walk around the gym, showing off their cute outfits. I walked with Gwen in parade. She waved at everybody and thought it was great!

They also handed out prizes for costumes. We won the "Best Family Theme" prize. We were lucky because another family showed up after the judging in WAY better costumes. Whew!

Next was the cupcake walk. Gwen always loves an opportunity to have frosting...

Gwen played lots of cute little carnival-style games and got lots of candy as prizes. The games were a little too advanced for her. If you had to have any type of skill to win the candy, Gwen would have gone home empty handed. But, Gwen didn't seem to mind that she wasn't quite successful with the games. She was just happy to be playing them. She was soooo cute!

I love how the reflective material on her costume glows with the flash from the camera...

One of the highlights for Gwen was meeting "Rudolph" in the flesh. She wanted to go find him every five minutes.

It was getting past Gwen's bedtime, so we snuck in one more cake walk before calling it a night...

When we got home, Gwen immediately said to me, "Mom, can you take your costume off now?" I guess she still wasn't loving it. She followed me to my room and supervised the process to make sure it was done quickly. After I took it off she said, "Now will you hang it where I can't see it?" I still laugh when I think about this.

After putting Gwen to bed, we spent the next hour giggling, while cleaning chili off of the upholstery, wheel well, spare time, car jack, jumper cables, etc. It was a night (and a smell) we won't soon forget!