True Life: Hallowen with a Baby

Okay, please bear with me as we travel back in time...to Halloween 2010. Derek & I were so excited to dress Shelby up in the costume that Derek's mom had gotten for us before she was born. We were so excited about this Halloween..it was our first Halloween as a family of 3, and it was our first Halloween with trick-or-treaters! We never had a single trick-or-treater in the 3 years we lived in Virginia, so we were so excited to experience Halloween on base.

One of my friends Cindy (who is an Air Force wife as well...and who I miss so much!) had always told me that living on base is like a throw-back to the fifties..and that analogy is certainly true for Keesler AFB. Our neighborhood is filled with sweet families, and the parents all feel safe enough to let their kids play and ride their bikes to school unsupervised. People don't feel the need to keep their doors locked at all times, and neighbors feel free to just "come on in." It's a very nice change of pace from living in Northern Virginia (although we did love our little life there, too!). I say all this to help you understand why we were so excited about Halloween...it was such a sweet night filled with families walking door to door with their precious kids. I've never seen so many trick-or-treaters!

Anyhow, back to my point of how excited we were about dressing Shelby up for her first Halloween. Well, she had other plans for us. It was, in all honesty, the roughest day of her short 6 weeks of life. She literally cried and screamed all.day.long. It was so hard on her and us. Needless to say, she didn't get to wear her costume. :( So we were very thankful that we did a little Halloween photo shoot with Shelby a few weeks ago when we were trying to get a photo for our Halloween card. So here's a pic of Derek & Shelby in their matching scrubs from back in September when she was about 1.5 weeks old. :)

Oh.my.gosh. I can't get over how tiny she looks in this picture!

Despite all of the crying, we were able to enjoy the trick-or-treaters and some yummy cupcakes that I made!
Although we really wanted a sweet family photo of our first Halloween together, that just wasn't in the stars. So here's the only picture we were able to capture!
And we know next year when we do get to dress Shelby up, we'll look back on her first Halloween and laugh.