The princess and the puppy

While I am beyond grateful for the experiences that my daughters are able to have living in a foreign country, there are a few things that I feel they are missing out on by not being in the US.  Halloween, along with the whole going to the pumpkin patch thing, is one of them.  As I discovered last year, Halloween/trick-or-treating is not a big deal here.  You might be able to find a random neighborhood with a few people (probably Americans) passing out candy, but I don't know where they are and I wouldn't take the girls there anywhere even if I did.  So as an alternative, the neighborhood women's club I'm a member of (which is about 50% American women) had a little Halloween event.  All the kids got to dress up in their costumes and take a short walk up and down the street.  Along the way, there were a couple stops with someone passing out candy to the kids.

Olivia's costume was easy as she had just received a beautiful princess dress from Uncle Brian and Aunt Jessica for her birthday.  Ashton was going to be a penguin.  I had found this cute baby penguin costume on Amazon UK and ordered it for her.  It arrived a week or two before the event, but I didn't bother to open the package since we were about to leave for Portugal and I was busy.  Well, two days beforehand, I finally got around to opening it.  I had ordered a size 6-12 months, but what showed up looked like something a 4 year old could wear!  It was absolutely humongous.  Just look at her...

I was laughing so hard as I took this picture because she was flopping around like a fish trying to turn herself over but unable to because her hands and legs were swimming in fabric.

I know she's on the small size her for age, but really???

She still makes a pretty cute penguin regardless of the size!

It's not like we have a Target around the corner that I could run to and pick up another costume that fit for her and it was too late to order anything else off of Amazon.  So I was left scrambling for something else.  Fortunately, I remembered I had brought over Olivia's first Halloween costume, a little puppy dog outfit, from three years ago.  And while Olivia wore it when she was around 7 weeks old, it was pretty big on her so I was hopeful Ashton could squeeze in.  Sure enough, it fit perfectly!

 

After the parade down the street, all the kids and parents were invited to watch Monsters University at the nearby theater.  It was Olivia's first experience at the movies.  I didn't have high hopes for her attention span to make it very far into the movie because she doesn't watch movies at home and has difficulty sit still for anything longer than about 30 minutes.  However, she surprised me and made it through about 80% of the movie before demanding to go home so she could take a nap.  So Mommy and Olivia left while Daddy and sleeping Ashton stayed to finish out the movie.