Not Your Average Fall Festival

I hate it when I look at the calendar and realize it's almost the middle of November and I still haven't blogged about half the stuff we did in October.

So lets just take a quick stroll down memory lane. Not too far, just back a couple of weeks.

The Sunday before Halloween, our church had a HUGE "Party in the Park". Brandon was heavily involved in the planning process, which explains why we were the only fall festival in the area with this:

Yes, that is an axe-throwing station.

When we got to the event, the crowd was still somewhat small (1000-1500 people ended up coming), so the boys took advantage of short lines to participate in this:

They climbed into these giant inflated beach balls, then prepared to do their best hamster impersonation.

At one point, someone sat around their house and thought, "I have this great idea. Let's stick kids in giant transparent beach balls, then watch with glee as they run around on a pool filled with water, trying hopelessly to catch their balance while their orange hairspray rubs all over the inside of the beach ball, making them look less like Ron Weasley and more like some sort of tye-dyed Beanie Baby."

Goes without saying that the boys LOVED this. And throughout the night, a sizable crowd formed, watching the kids run around their hamster wheels.

It was almost as good entertainment as this:

Emerson smiling for pictures while strapped into a velcro suit and thrown up onto the wall? Funny every time.

All of the pastors took their shift in the dunk tank:

After getting dunked a couple dozen times, Brandon changed into his costume for the evening.

Of course my husband has a head-to-toe Thor costume that he's had more than one occasion to wear.

Of course some of our high school students had some of these super-creepy "morph suits".

Another activity making our fall festival a bit, um, unique?

Paintball the Pastors.

Thor costume optional.

All in all, when I wasn't doing frantic head counts, making sure no one had wandered off unnoticed, and cleaning cotton candy off Harry Potter robes, and searching high and low for Aidan's lost scarf, and briefly losing Emerson, we had an unforgettable time at Party in the Park.

And Brandon's keeping that Thor costume.