Happy Halloween!!!

I've been thinking a lot lately about enjoying every day more. It seems so easy to let months or even years slip by just waiting for things to change or wishing that they hadn't. I can't tell you how many times I've started a sentence with something like 'Back when I lived in Ohio we used to..." or "When I finally fully recover from this stupid South American disease we can...". I think everybody does it- it's just such an easy way to think. So about a month ago I decided to change. Or at least try. I took a little personal inventory of all the things that make me enjoy life and decided to make a specific plan to put them into action. Here's part of the list

-celebrating holidays (even little ones)
-being around people
-cooking amazing food
-sharing that amazing food with people who OOO and AHHH over it
-decorating my house

This past month my plan of action was to plan a Halloween party which would, of course, involve all of the things in the above list. It's been great! This month has been so full of moving and remodeling and being sick and all sorts of things that would normally make me think- 'wow, I can't wait until October is over so that we'll be done with all this!'. But instead I've seriously had so much fun every day thinking about how to decorate a table with the things I found in boxes as I unpacked, using my sick time in bed reading all sorts of recipes and then day dreaming about Halloween Dinner menus while I scrubbed walls and ovens to ready our apartment for the new renters. It's really been such a great month!

So that was my crazy idea for the month, and here are the results! (I spent all month planning this, so every detail was really exciting to me... I guess that's why I'm including SO many pictures!)

I painted this for our screen door. I just cracked myself up every time the doorbell rang and I got to stick my face through Frankenstein's head to see who it was.



We invited all of our Christensen cousins over for dinner and a movie. All the while we took turns handing out candy to Trick or Treaters.


I was so proud of myself when I thought of putting water balloons in vases!

Dinner started with a Frankenstein Cheese ball, followed with Butternut Squash soup (served out of a pumpkin!), biscuits (cut with a pumpkin cookie cutter) and a salad with pear, bacon and sweet onion topped with toasted curry pumpkin seeds and a honey dijon vinaigrette dressing with roasted garlic and sunflower seeds. All of it was completely made from scratch, including the salad dressing. Yum. I'm loving the having the leftovers sitting around today!



After dinner we watched 'Corpse Bride', sipped a warm vanilla almond drink, and ate caramel apples (with homemade caramel of course). It was such a great night and so fun to be with the cousins all together! I can definitely say that I loved living every minute of October!