Friday night was the annual Nickelodeon Halloween Party in Burbank. Our good friend, Ashley, is a producer there, and provided us with tickets again! Here was our clan, which everyone thought was one family, all offspring from me! You cannot believe the looks we got. The fun started with tons o'food. Cotton candy, candy apple station, sliders, hot dogs, fries, pizza, etc. MMmmmmm. Junk food.
Here's Ashley, enjoying her last day of work before she has twin girls in a couple of weeks. 
There was also cookie decorating, crafts, and pumpkin decorating.
Then we visited each department in Nickelodeon to trick-or-treat. They were amazing! Each department (i.e. Sponge Bob, Dora, etc.) decorated their hallways into spook alleys. THey were pretty cool, but the kids were much more interested in the candy.
This is the Sponge Bob underwater dance party balloon stomp.
And here the kids are digging candy out of a huge nose.
This was some show, which they 3-D animated around a campfire. Grayson liked it!
ANd then it was time to leave. Now we get to do it all over again tonight!
Carissa is on the U-10 "Cotton Candy" this year, and has a great team! She is the "frustrater" (as Lee calls her), and has the best stamina of any of the girls. She's really improving each year! The pale green weeds you see are courtesy of the rain showers from a few weeks ago.
We graced everyone with our presence for one full game this week. Why only one, you say? Grayson+ Bleachers= TROUBLE. 
Fall, of course, means back to school, and the return of Miss Bradford and her loyal pupils Grayson and Derek, and the other "imaginary" class members. (There's a class list.)
Things go well until the unruly students decide to not follow directions and Miss Bradford inevitably learns that teaching is a thankless job!
And what Fall would be complete with out a trip to the Pumpkin Patch. We went to Lombardi Ranch with Grayson's class which included an animal tour ("Horses were brought to the west during the colonization period. Who can tell me what colonization means?? Hmmm??") I'm serious. Anyway- we skipped the tour after the "horses" incident and Grayson spent the remainder of the time throwing straw.
Then I decided to skip buying the $15 pumpkins that were trucked in and placed in the farm. "Mommy, we didn't get a pumpkin", said Grayson. "That's because we're going to a different Pumpkin Patch, honey. It's called Trader Joe's Patch." I'd say that at $3.49 a pumpkin it was a wise move.
But eventually he did, and working as a family we lugged the broken pieces to a ginormous bin in the front, then Lee prepped the area for concrete, and with the help of Dad, built the frame.
The concrete people finished in about 2 hours. We planted grass on the new dirt area, and put in shrubs which will soon offer a screen between the neighbors yard and ours.
So it all came down, was given away on Craigslist in about 10 minutes, and we bit the bullet and bought some nice El Dorado stone instead.
We like it a lot! Eventually the vine will grow through the trellis and hang down from the top and we won't have the pleasure of waving to our neighbors in their bedroom from our bedroom window.
Lee also built a gate, which I think he did a great job on!
Now we are trying to figure out what to do in this corner. But for the time, we are happy to not be looking at pink brick!
The boys may miss the play structure that once stood here, and was falling apart,
but they've more than made up for it with their PVC pipe swings, as evidenced by the dead lawn spots. 
Maybe next Spring Break we'll fix those! 
