Goodnight Moon

This will be my last post for this blog. In a few days I'll delete the blog entirely. Today we received notification that my husband will be honorably discharged from the Navy after 10 loyal years in September 2012. Thanks to President Obama's Plan to downsize our nation's military, our family and some six hundred others in San Diego have been been punched in the gut today. We had just reinlisted for another 6 years just last year. We were supposed to have our truck shipped on the 30th of this month and our pack out on the next month. We were excitedly planning our first move overseas. I was looking forward to time off with my family while we settled in. And now this!

Pack Out Is Scheduled

I cannot even recap on how confusing the whole getting ready for the overseas pack-out has been. We started our adventure by visiting Personal Property back in this post. We were sent an email with instructions for logging into the DPS website. I am usually by no means technically retarded, but getting registered for use of this website was confusing and made me feel a bit incompetent. I'm pretty sure this had a lot to do with the fact that I couldn't devote 100% of my attention to accomplishing the task. Anyway, getting registered to use it was the hardest part. Then there was a bit of reading before doing a fancy guestimate of how much shit we'll be taking with us for this move. My husband had to complete the last step in person. Our official pack out dates are December 15th to pack it all up...which happens to be the same day as my company's Christmas Party...and December 16th to load it all up. So we'll be living in a near empty house and out of suitcases for the Holidays and until we fly out on February 1st. Nothing gets ya into the holiday spirit like an empty nest!

Trick Or Treat Smell My Feet

Our Halloween was pretty festive this year.I spent the week gathering parent volunteers. I went into my daughter's class on my lunch break Thursday to help the kinder students decorate a sign for our booth. I got to take the Saturday and Sunday prior to Halloween off of work (it's a rare occurrence for me to get two days off in a row). Saturday was quite eventful! I woke up early to volunteer at my daughter's school and prepare for their Fall Carnival. Our Kindergarten classroom hosted a Sand Art Table (which turned out to be a hit). And then Saturday, I set up our booth and prepared for the day. The Fall Carnival was from 12-4. They had SO MUCH to do! In addition to our Sand Art Table, there was a haunted house, kids could pop balloons with darts, toss a ball to knock down stacked jars, attempt to match numbers on the bottoms of ducks, bean bag toss, some football toss, a put put area, pony rides, a cake walk, face painting, there was a DJ, popcorn, the Goldenspoon Frozen Yogurt, Hamburgers and Hot Dogs, a costume contest, and I'm sure I'm missing a few things. Matty and I took the kids for a couple of hours and then we went home to prepare for the best Haunted Hayride Ever! 

My father and his girlfriend Lisa and all most of their neighbors went all out for Halloween! Six houses hosted a haunted hayride with lots to do. At the first house there was a nice spread of appetizers and sugar cookies for the kids to decorate. At the second house there were caramel apple martinis for the grown ups and mini pumpkins for the kids to color with markers. The third stop was dad and Lisa's house for some more snacks. The forth house was a haunted house that terrified the shit out of Catalina. The fifth house offered sandwiches and music for everyone. And the last house had deserts. Each house was decked out and decorated and in between houses guys in scary masks and zombies made the hayride interesting. 

Here's a few shots to share:

My Sugar Skull Meets Demon Nun Costume...I'm sure it pissed some people off...

My Demon Seed

My Sweet Busy Bee

Some of the Kiddies Pre-Terrified

The pumpkin I freehanded traced

Matty didn't dress up...but he wore one of my dad's costumes while scaring the kids. I might add more photos to this later, but since my Halloween post is already a week late...I'm just going to put it up there....