Cave

One day Hogan mentioned that he wanted to see a cave. I can't remember what sparked his interest- a book, a tv show??? but when he said this I told him that Oma and Opa lived near a cave. He was very excited about this and when the big September birthday weekend came around, Hogan totally remembered our conversation about the cave near Oma and Opa and asked if we go see it while we were visiting, which as you can see from the pictures we did indeed get to do.

I think overall he liked the experience. One thing that was pretty tricky was that you're not supposed to touch ANY of the formations in the cave. This is really difficult for a 3-year old to remember when so much of his learning is through sense of touch. You also have to stay with the group. This is not a place to run ahead- again a bit of a stretch for Hogan, although I will say he tried his hardest to follow the rules.

What was very cool was that we saw an actual bat in the cave. It flitted and flew over our heads. The guide gave us directions about what to do if the bat lands on you. "Stand very still", he said(yeah, right!). Luckily, the bat made the wise choice to stay above our heads and landed only on rocks. By the time we left Hogan could point out the stalagtites and several times since the trip he's talked about stalagtites and stalagmites- so the trip definitely made an impression.

Trick-or-treating with friends

This was the first time that Hogan got to do the door-to-door trick-or-treating. He totally got into it and as you can see from all the blurry pictures would NOT stand still long enough for me to get a shot. I tried to pick the least blurriest ones. Needless to say when we finally got home we had one tired Hogan/Batman who was already talking about his costume for next year and who went right to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow!

Hogan says: Thank you for letting me go Halloween place with me and Kayleigh. My favorite part was the scary part. I was scared because a man had a mask and we thought he wasn't real. He took off his mask and scared us. At first he scared us. He was a man and he was just playing jokes on us.

Trick-or-treating at the mall

Batman on the go

Checking his candy

Taking a break

Transformed back to Hogan- Batman had a busy night!

School Party

After carving our pumpkin we headed out to Hogan's school where his teacher had set up a mini-festival in her cul-de-sac. The kids paraded around the cul-de-sac and then were able to go around to different stations for food and activities. The top picture is the pose that Hogan would stand in anytime anyone asked to take a picture of batman.

Pumpkin Carving

Our Halloween festivities started with a little pumpkin carving. Hogan got very involved in ALL aspects of the process (I did draw the line at actually letting him carve the pumpkin). He helped clean out the goop and even drew the face (with just a little help from me). The best part was putting the flashlight inside and turning off all the lights...eerie!