Fall-oween

This year for Halloween the kids dressed up as a World War I dough boy and a wolf. Their costumes were all home-made or adapted from something else (the army jacket was a Goodwill petite jacket). Dominic was really proud to wear his antique children's dough boy helmet as part of his costume. At the last moment I sewed some fur and felt claws onto an old pair of gloves which was a nice, warm addition to Evelyn's wolf costume. The night was a little chilly but it was thankfully dry. The kids ended up with lots of candy! Some of the candy ends up in their specimen test tubes, just for fun. We kinda enjoy the mad scientist spectrum of Halloween more than the gory, spooky side.

Our pumpkins were carved with Miyazaki characters. Dominic's pumpkin was a Totoro and Evelyn's was the Cat Bus, both from the movie My Neighbor Totoro. It's a very cute movie if you haven't seen it.

We also went to the work day for the church. We raked a lot of leaves at the parsonage and then walked down to the monastery and raked more leaves. It was quite enjoyable to see everyone all pitching in.  I was really impressed with the kids - they raked until they were sore! Afterwards Romanos invited us into the monastery and he gave a little tour of all the updates that he's been doing. One of the improvements was to get vinyl cling icons for most of the windows.  Later that same day we were all back in church for Vespers and the Akathist to the Mother of God, Protector of Children.