House moving, parade, pumpkin and dress ups! Oh my!

We are nearing the end of a 4 day weekend due to Melbourne Cup Day today. Somehow the weekend turned into a crazy, chaotic rush instead of the easy going weekend we had planned. Marnie got the keys to the new house yesterday so Saturday and Sunday were spent cleaning out her room and boxing up 26 years of everything you could possibly imagine. What she failed to mention was that somehow amid the chaos she had to get a cheque to the solicitor in the city by 11.30am Monday so the house could settle. With not enough time left hubby and I rushed into the city and just in the nick of time got the cheque to the relevant person and all was ok in the end. We didn't count on the city streets being closed for the Parade of Past Champions of the Melbourne Cup and the extra traffic and lack of parking that would cause. For some reason that slipped all our minds. We were so rushed that hubby had to drop me at the door and continue driving around looking for a place to park. After I had dropped the cheque off and made my way out to the street again, the parade was about to begin. I snapped a few photos to show you with my trusty iphone.

Then it was time to make our way home again. By this time Marnie had collected the keys to the new home and was loading boxes into the van. A kind friend arrived with a van and helped her move which was quite a relief as she had organised to load the big furniture items into the horse float which would have been quite a sight for our neighbours and hers! There were many helpers so the move went as smoothly as it could.

A few trips back and forth and the moving was done.

We don't do Halloween in Australia but this year to our surprise there were a few American style pumpkins popping up in the grocery stores so of course we had to have a go at carving one. Kaylee was excited to see a jack-o-lantern in the real and not just in pictures. This is our first ever attempt at carving a pumpkin.

This is how happy Kaylee was with the pumpkin.

 
Now that we had our jack-o-lantern we had to continue the theme and dress up. With costumes we put together from what we had and some black material Kaylee became a green witch, I'm not exactly sure what Ben was but he was rather creepy and I was a pumpkin head! Ben did a great job of face painting.

We enjoyed immensely the fun of our first Aussie Halloween.

Today is Cup Day and finally the rush has died down and we enjoyed the annual family cup sweep for the Melbourne Cup race and Shannon took out the first prize with the winning horse from France, Dunaden.

It was a long weekend but fun!

Cheers,
Lynda