pumpkins and trick-or-treating

We were a little late in getting pumpkins to carve this year, which may explain why we got such crappy ones. They definitely were not your regular carving variety; they were so thick and hard that we had to use a regular knife and a hammer to hack through them.Making precise cuts in the pumpkins was out of the question. It was so difficult to do anything with them that Eric's ended up with a cleft pallet when he pounded a little too hard.
Abby had a rough day, so we dressed Madilyn up as a beautiful butterfly and let Abby get to bed early.
On our way to trick-or-treat.

Madilyn and I went out with another family in the ward. Their little girl was dressed as a bee.
Happy Halloween!

big news

I talked to my mom on the 12th, and during our conversation I mentioned that Abby still won't walk on her own. If I distract her I can get her to take a few steps, but when she realizes I'm tricking her she sits down. Therefore, I was really surprised the very next morning when she started venturing away from furniture all by herself. Within a week she mastered walking, and now she struts around like a pro.
This video isn't of her walking, but it's pretty cute anyway.

the nightmare before halloween

Madilyn and Abby have really started playing well together. It's fun to see and nice that I don't have to provide as much entertainment to keep them busy. So when I heard them playing on the stairs I didn't think too much about it and decided to finish paying some bills before getting them ready for bed. Soon they were really giggling and laughing out loud, which made me smile as I hurried to complete my task. However, before I even got up from my chair Madilyn came down and asked me to look at her. My smile vanished as soon as I realized what was making them laugh so hard. They were both covered in vaseline! Abby's hair was the worst, with big gobs all over the top of her head and smeared over her clothes.Here's the empty tub of vaseline (it was nearly full when they found it).
Vaseline hand prints on the wall led me up the stairs to even more goopyness on the closet door. The paint here is the super-cheap matte kind, so even after I wiped all the vaseline off you can see an oily residue where it was.
I guess I can't be too upset about it though, they sure enjoyed themselves and I guess it was a good tactile experience for them.
The relatively small amount of vaseline on Madilyn gave me a good idea who spread most of the vaseline around.

1st clean up attempt

I remembered hearing that baking soda gets vaseline out of hair, so I took the girls to the tub to give it a try. I called Eric to look up tips for me on the internet. One of the tips said to mix the baking soda with shampoo, so I tried that and washed Abby's hair like normal.I repeated the procedure a few times on Abby, since her hair was the worst. While she is happy in this picture, by the time I was done with her she didn't want me to touch her head.
I couldn't tell if the baking soda was working because the hair was shiny from being wet. I knew that, at the least, I had gotten the big globs out so I pulled Abby out and stuck Madilyn in. I made the huge mistake of not draining the water before starting on Madilyn, so I think the only thing I accomplished in this clean up attempt was to evenly coat both girls in vaseline.

2nd and 3rd attempts

The next morning the girls' hair was dry and it was obvious I didn't get all the goop out. Abby's hair kind of looked like someone had used too much pomade on her.Her hair stayed just about any way I combed it.
So back in the tub they went. This time I was a little smarter and left their hair dry before powdering it up. I also used corn starch instead of baking soda.

Madilyn thought it was very funny that they looked like grandmas.
This seemed to work much better than the first attempt, so I toweled them off and waited to see the results. Their hair was much better, but still a little greasy so I powdered them up one more time 2 days later. While I learned many things about the best way to get vaseline out of little girls' hair, the biggest lesson I learned was to be more careful in keeping vaseline and other potentially troublesome items out of reach.

conference weekend

We went to Nancy (Eric's mom)'s house to watch General Conference. While we were there we also celebrated Eric's and Nancy's birthdays. Madilyn was really excited, mostly because she knows that her birthday is the next one after her Daddy's.
Eric chose this enormous cake over the smaller, flowery one I wanted to get. It was delicious, but much too big for 5 adults and 2 toddlers. In his defense, we were anticipating more people coming.
I've been noticing that I have a lot of these deer-in-the-headlights pictures of Abby. It's kind of funny because she's so smiley. I'd expect more smiley pictures.
We had to relight the candles so Madilyn could help blow them out.