This past weekend was a fun-filled Halloween party for my family.  We LOVE Halloween at our house.  My girls are already walking around the house in their costumes every night, we have lots of decorations outside (the neighborhood kids say our house is the spookiest), and I am planning our trick-or-treating already. 

We enjoyed a couple of Halloween events this weekend with the girls, and had a blast. 

Saturday night, my husband convinced me to take the girls (yes, they are 3 and 4), on the Haunted Hayrack Rides at Carter's in Sherman.  We invited our friends to join us, ate a quick supper and headed out.  This place is very popular among the teenagers around here, so we wanted to get there early to avoid a long wait.  The rides start at 7:00, and we got there at 7:03.  We still had to wait for an hour and a half before we got our hayrack ride.  There was well over 250 people there before us.  But we enjoyed the bonfire, hot cocoa, coffee and french fires while we danced to classic rock tunes blaring out of ginormous speakers. 

Finally, they called our ticket numbers.  We lined up to get our seats, buried ourselves in the hay, and cuddled up with the kids to set out to the dark, dark forest.  Throughout our 20 minutes ride through the dark, dark forest, we encountered flying monkeys  (who my 4 year old insists peed on her), a few headless horsemen, countless monsters and creepy guys, a barn full of monsters and loud noises, and a monster that "squirted water in my eye", according to my 4 year old.  We all survived, mostly.  So far, no nightmares as a result of our spooky ride through the dark, dark forest.  And my 3 year old has repeated over and over for the past few days, "They were just people dressed up in costumes, right?"

On Sunday, we took our, not so spooky, but just as traditional, trip to the Pumpkin Patch.  Since the kids were born, we have made a day of heading to Champaign to Curtis Orchard to ride the ponies, slides, the hay wagon and pick our own pumpkins.  There is tons of stuff for the kids to do, a cafe with great comfort food, yummy apple donuts and homemade apple cider, and the FABULOUS Pumpkin Patch.  My husband insists on heading out to the farthest point of the pumpkin patch (and this is a big pumpkin patch) to pick the perfect pumpkin.  This year he found 4 of them, each one bigger and rounder than the first.  He didn't get to do this kind of stuff growing up, so I let him enjoy his day as much as the kids do. 

This year, we added a trip to Lake of the Woods park in Mahomet for a picnic after the pumpkin patch.  There was a group of 5 or 6 families and we all brought picnic foods, watched the kids play and cooked hot dogs.  What a great day! 

More to come next weekend, although this weekend will be hard to beat.

Happy Halloween all!!