Halloween 2012

 Grandma was still here helping out after Mckayla was born, so we had a really fun Halloween this last year.  Mckayla was only 9 days old, so we took it pretty easy.  We started out painting the girls' nails since that's tradition before Grandma leaves when a baby is born and she was leaving the next morning.  Then, after nails we took pictures of the girls in their Halloween shirts Grandma bought them.  Ellie was entertaining during out photo shoot.

 I love that Ellie looking at the second picture just now pointed to herself kneeling and said "Joseph Smith!" because she thinks anyone kneeling like they are praying looks like the painting of Joseph Smith praying in the Sacred Grove.  If you don't understand this reference and want to, feel free to go to Mormon.org to learn more.

Ellie loves to "hold" Mckayla - for a few seconds - so we tried to let her be the big sister and hold Mckayla for a few pictures too.  Sadly, these are some of the ones where Mckayla was best supported.  Poor younger siblings.  Good thing they're resilient. 

After that, we just had a normal day with lunch and nap time until after Steve got home that night.  Our Ward wasn't doing anything for Halloween this year and we weren't ready to go trick-or-treating this year quite yet, so we went to our old ward's Trunk-or-Treat with an invitation from a friend in the ward.  We had to wake Ellie up from her nap to get ready, so we were running behind and our camera was dying.  As a result we just got a couple quick pictures of the girls in their costumes on Halloween.  So here are our only pictures from the actual day of our ladybug and butterfly.

Another tradition we've seemed to create is that we take Reva to Applebees before she heads home when our babies are born.  So after Trunk-or-treating we headed to Applebees for dinner. When we got home Reva carved a jack-o-lantern with Ellie.  Her first ever.

 The finished product on our porch.  I love that she chalked up another pumpkin while they were out there too.

We wanted to make sure we got some good pictures of the girls in their costumes though, so a number of days later I got them in their costumes.  The following is an entertaining abbreviated version of how my photo shoot went with Ellie.

First, she was not interested in pictures, just playing.  But, I wanted a picture of the back of her cute costume anyway.

 Then I got funny faces while I tried to get her to keep still and she just wanted to see the pictures I was taking.

 Hooray for the only good, smiling picture!  Most of her pictures lately have weird faces as she either decides she doesn't want pictures or says "Cheese!" which makes a strange face.

 And speaking of getting grumpy and not wanting pictures....

 Pouting to Daddy to save her as I took loads more pictures of the cute angry faces.

 So funny.  And then I stopped being a jerk.

Mckayla's photo shoot was much shorter and less successful where good pictures are concerned as she was hungry and thought the hood was teasing her for food.  As a result we got very few pictures where you can see her face.  But, here she is.  We think she looks a lot like Ellie did when Ellie wore this costume 2 years ago as a 2 month old.  Partially because Mckayla is probably just as big if not bigger here than Ellie was at that point.  Crazy big baby.

One thing is for certain.  They were both cute bugs and we loved our first Halloween with sisters.  I guess that's two things that are for certain.