The Hansen Family: October 2019

October started with our 17th Wedding Anniversary!

What an incredible 17 years we've enjoyed together. SO blessed.

Matt let me choose the date and we went to see Downton Abbey in the theater -

he may have let out a little snore in the middle of it but I loved every minute of it! Haha.

We have one little apple tree here that went bananas this year and produced FOUR 5 gallon buckets full of apples! WOW! We were neck deep in apples for most of the month - Matt taught the kids how to really bob for apples, we learned how to make apple pie filling and applesauce, we have dehydrated apples galore and I really don't care to ever see another apple again for awhile!

Early October also brings one of our favorite weekends of the year - General Conference! We were thrilled to see Matt's cousin Clarissa in the choir during one of the sessions! The kids actually brought down their mattresses for a super comfy spot to listen and take notes this year. SO much great encouragement and teaching from our church leaders and some exciting changes too.

☺

October brought the last month of Carly's 8th grade volleyball season. She had a lot of fun and continually improved til she had her very best performance in the last game - so exciting to watch. She also thought it was pretty cool that she got to be the flagger this year for one game.

I'm sure flagger is the proper term for that job. ;)

Alissa went on her first official DATE this month! She and a friend invited these handsome fellas to a breakfast challenge date. They met at Safeway and each couple had $5 to spend on groceries then they came back to our house and cooked up a delicious breakfast. Matt was more than happy to be the judge - it was so fun and they had a great time. Milk in fancy glasses was my favorite part!

And as Christmas is creeping up on us - it was time to get our annual family pictures taken for our Christmas cards. We took some portraits on our back deck a couple different times and called it good because, honestly, we look GOOD! :)

The kids look especially good in these shots...

Alissa's friend decided rather than going to Homecoming at her school, she wanted to gather a group of her friends and they all dress up nice, go to a nice dinner then have a fun night together.

As the end of the month approached - a lot of Halloween fun started happening. I joined Alissa and her friend Elizabeth as minions at our Ward Trunk or Treat and carnival.

And the next night there was a dress-up stake youth dance that the girls had fun at with their friends.

We took a family trip to our local WinCo and picked out pumpkins to carve - both Alissa and I opted for small pumpkins this year but, honestly, it's just as much work cleaning the guts out of those guys - if not harder because of the limited space you have to get your hand in there to scrape the goo out!

Here's some of our food fun this year...

And the end results of our carving adventures...

Then Halloween arrived. We put a basket of goods out for trick or treaters but we got a grand total of TWO that came! We live on a dark dead end street just past a sign that says "county road ends" so most people don't even know our house and our neighbor's house is even there so it's not a big surprise. We dropped Alissa off at a friend's house for a teenager party then grabbed Carly's friend to come trick or treating with us - she'd made an amazing robot costume that tons of people loved. She told us the right neighborhood to go to and we were loaded up with candy - even 5 full size candy bars made it to their candy haul this year. One house even had a big display from the movie Coco in their garage and was handing out fresh hot popcorn to everyone that came by.