Festival As A Verb

I love Fall. I love my family. I love Fall-festivalling with my family (see previous years here and here). Seriously though (and this deserves a blog post all its own), my immediate family members are my best friends. I love those guys and everyday wish with all of my being that we lived in the same place. Truth be told I often get sad thinking about my sister and me, both stay-at-home Moms doing the same things everyday, yet living three hours away from each other. I mean, we could be doing all of these things TOGETHER.

But anyway. This past weekend was our little town's little Fall Festival. Although I am thinking they must have put it in the newspaper down in Phoenix or something because there were so, so many people down there. We had a great time though, and luckily we arrived just as it began so we could hightail it out of there before 1pm when it started to get really packed. It's always a fun event- tons of things for kids to do between the jumpy castles, booths to trick-or-treat, and even a little pumpkin patch. It's events like this that make me love where we live even more, and grateful that there's always something fun to do with kids. And even though sometimes Hank and I dream of big cities and different places, right now small town life is really the life for us.

Here are some photos from our weekend- I hope you had a lovely one too!

Pumpkin Festival 2012

Another year, another pumpkin festival! One of the things I really love about our town is the constant stream of things to do with little ones, especially during the holidays. Every year we have a Halloween Festival downtown, the weekend before Halloween. There's trick-or-treating, games, a costume contest, and tons of activities for kids. Last year we kept talking about how excited we were for the next year, when Henry was sure to enjoy it a lot more. And he definitely did! His favorite part were probably either the bounce houses or the pumpkin patch. He was also really excited to meet Darth Vader and practiced saying "Hi, Vaaader!" a million times...but then got scared when it was his turn. It was a wonderful afternoon though and I'm so happy my parents and Lauren could come up for the day. Henry dressed up like a shark, although his actual Halloween costume is something totally different.

Do you have any fun traditions in your town? Where we live now is super similar to the town I grew up in on the East Coast so it's fun that we're able to keep some of my childhood traditions going here, even though we're across the country! I'm looking forward to making this Festival a yearly event for us.