Family Photos

I never had the chance to blog about this, but we had a GREAT family vacation to San Francisco for a week. We spent part of the time celebrating my sister's 35th birthday with her family, our family, my parents, and Nick. I really love for Zadie to have time with her cousins. We spent the rest of the week in the city with Tori's friend Nika and her family (thank you, Nika, for the kind hospitality!). Hanging out in the city is always great, but this time it was even more special because Nick is now a freshman at San Francisco State and he accompanied us just about everywhere we went. Aside from being good company, he's a huge help with both kids.

Kim was kind enough to take some family photos of us, which I was very excited about. These are the first good photos we've had of Skip and we really treasure them. I will post more in upcoming posts of each kiddo, but I thought I'd start by posting the family shots. Kim had her work cut out for her since Zadie was in the worst mood ever!

Thank you, Kim, for your awesome photos! You can check out more of her photos on her blog.

Halloween

It took me a while, but I'm finally posting Halloween photos! This was really the first Halloween Zadie was actually engaged in the whole event. Tori made her a tin man costume from The Wizard of Oz. Most of you probably know that Tori has dressed up as a tin man practically every single Halloween. It was nice that she passed this costume along to Zadie this year. As you can see from the photo, it turned out pretty cute and we got a TON of compliments. We went to the "walk streets" in Manhattan Beach, which is packed with tons of families. Given the locale, it's fairly well-to-do. Zadie's costume was the only homemade costume we saw ALL night!! Nice work, Tori!

Maybe Skip will be the tin man next year and Zadie will be the lion. If her hair is longer she can be Dorothy. Anyway, this year Skip was a skeleton. I'm not into gory/scary costumes, but it just so happened that this little pajama outfit was amongst some hand-me-downs that a friend sent and so it went perfectly. Not sure why Linda painted his nose black, but it looked cute.

A prize to anyone who can tell me what Linda is dressed up as. She's wearing a footed pajama outfit that she found at a garage sale (who knew they came in adult sizes?) and her nose is painted black and her hair is in little pigtails. It's the nose that throws me off because otherwise I would guess she was dressed as a baby or something. Whatever the case, it was enough to get her a bag full of candy and she had a good time.

It's really funny to me when I think about what must have been going through Zadie's head this Halloween. We hadn't told her anything about the holiday at all, but all of the sudden one day we start dressing her up in a box with shiny stuff on the outside, paint her face silver, and ask her to carry around a silver axe. She duly complied, but she was really taken aback when she looked in the mirror and saw her face painted. Anyway, then we walk a few blocks and take her from house to house to trick-or-treat. There were lots of other oddly dressed people and they were all going around getting this stuff in little wrappers. See, Zadie has never had candy and I really don't think she understood what people were giving her. She never asked to have a piece. But she was still very interested in getting more of whatever people were giving and kept doing her infamous "Mo!" at all the houses. She didn't seem to take a lot of joy in getting the candy, which was just fine with us!

Thanks to Tori's sister Katie for taking these photos. She and her husband Leo are pictured above with their brand-new baby boy, Gavin.