A Sugary Recovery

We're home!

We got out of jail - aka the hospital - last Tuesday, the day before Halloween. The timing couldn't have been better - Hannah loves Halloween, especially the candy, so we just had to be home to go Trick-or-Treating together. My mom came out to help us, so she got to enjoy her grandkids.

First, we gave Cohen lots of welcome home affection.

Enjoying some Grandma-love...

And I found the perfect shirt at Target (fluke) to leave the hospital in...

"I Still Live With My Parents"

Nurses thought this was pretty funny... hey, after 19 days, I had to find humor and JOY in parting! ;)

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The night we brought Cohen home, we went outside just as the sun was going down to FINALLY carve pumpkins. Hannah loved making pumpkin-gut soup while we polished off the job cleaning them out :)

Our handiwork:
Standing back to admire our handiwork:

Hannah was especially proud of her pumpkin - lopsided, mis-matched eyes and ears and all...
And below, Scooby-Doo, courtesy of mommy's very tired, painfully cramping fingers! This thing took forever!!! After careful examination, Hannah still couldn't tell what it was supposed to be - hey, can't you tell?

And then? Halloween! And fun, cute Halloween outfits. Jenna had on a pumpkin shirt for school, but I didn't get a picture - oh, well, musta been tired from all that carving and, well, she left the house so darn eeeaaarrrrllllyyy!
And then, there were the costumes. For months leading up to Halloween, Hannah requested (over and over and over again) Dora Halloween as her bed-time story. In fact, if you didn't know this and you were lucky enough to read it to her, you woulda thought my child a reading prodigy - she knew it line by line. Then she got it into her head that she wanted to be a kitty-cat like Dora. But, this was a delicate situation, you see, because I couldn't make Jenna's costume so cute and GIRLY that Hannah would become HOWLINGLY dissapointed in her choice - so no frilly pink and princess tiaras this year for either girl!! Just a silly witch... and her preening black cat.


And daddy-kisses for our monkey-boy. Complete with the responsive smile that always melts my heart:

Auntie Joan helped herd the kiddos out the door. Cohen tolerated his costume much better than I thought he would :)

And we're off!

The neighbors' witches pot. Had to take a picture.

Good thing that wasn't real fire - Jenna loved touching the "flame"

So, that was our Halloween, made even "sweeter" by our little guy's return. In fact, two nights ago, I ran to the store with my aunt and we returned home with one of those tantalizing little plastic containers from the quarter machine with a "prize" safely tucked away inside. Hannah was so excited to open it up and when she did, we laughed at the "bling" - a dollar sign on a silver chain. She asked what it meant and I told her it was a dollar sign - you know, I said, like money. She looked up at me, wheels turning.  Then she said she wanted to send the dollar to the doctor at the hop-spittal for making her baby brother "ALL better."

I am so blessed to have these beautiful children.

I will dedicate my next post to the baby in our bunch and his first year with us, culminating in those b-day pictures I have wanted to share but haven't...yet. Better late than never.