Gnomes, Parties, and Halloween!

 No, I did not have an epic weekend bender. Yes, I finally got to visit my family after like three weeks! On Friday I was able to drive home to the Akron-Canton area for the weekend. My family were happy to see me, my little siblings especially! The past couple weeks since I saw my family last I had been collecting a bunch of little gnome stuff to give to my mom. Gnomes are like her thing, she absolutely loves those little guys and loves to decorate the house with them. I keep grabbing these things I find because they remind me of her, and she can never have too many gnomes! She was so excited to receive them and immediately set them somewhere for decoration. However, her gnome collection does not compare to the Christmas nutcracker collection. I’ll have to count how many she has when she puts them out, but let me just preface by saying she has been collecting nutcrackers for a lot longer than the gnomes. 

What I mean by party is that my little sister‘s birthday party was this past weekend and she turned 7 on the 26th! She had decided on a unicorn theme for her birthday, so of course me and my mom had decorated the party area with everything unicorn, streamers, balloons, whatever we could find. My sister had also decided on spaghetti to serve to the guests. Usually it’s pizza but no, she wanted spaghetti and everyone was pleasantly surprised when she and her friends absolutely demolished their plates before heading to dessert. So for dessert, we thought it would be a good idea to make unicorn themed cut out cookies, make the frosting, grab some sprinkles, and let the kids go to town decorating cookies. They loved it! Well, as much as 7 year olds can really love an activity before being distracted. I think each kid probably decorated two cookies, scarfed them down and then ran. Me and my older cousins stuck behind and tried to decorate the rest of them but that was also cut short as my little sister decided it was present time! I'd like to add a little note that I know this sounds like a lot going on, but I promise I am making this as concise as I can. Kids are crazy. After presents, and some more running around, thankfully it was over! 

Until it wasn’t. There was still trick or treating to be done. Fortunately, the parents had taken their kids back to their own neighborhoods for their own trick or treating. That just brought it down to my two siblings, two younger cousins, and one of my older cousins. The older cousin is around my age, so that was nice to have someone to talk to while we walked the kids around the neighborhood. And to grab some “adult only” drinks that very few houses were passing out along the way. We even got stopped by a few parents on a golf cart who proceeded to hand us Jell-O shots. Of course the kids had a blast trick or treating, and when we came back they proceeded to dump their bags out and trade candy just like I used to do as a kid. Completely unprompted too, no one had taught them this!

That’s all I have for this week. It was probably the highlight of my week, nothing during the rest of this week will be as exciting or jam packed as the day of my little sister’s birthday. 

The birthday girl in question: