Lavinia’s First Halloween

This past weekend Henri and I really enjoyed celebrating Lavinia’s first Halloween. Originally, I had grand plans of making her a mandrake costume and Henri and I would dress up as Hogwarts students. Unfortunately, my best efforts didn’t work so on Thursday afternoon last week I headed off to Babies R Us to look for a store-bought costume. I sent Henri a picture of a unicorn costume as a joke but he fell in love with it and insisted that it HAD to be Lavinia’s costume so we went with it! [sidenote: waiting until the last minute to buy her costume actually paid off because they were all 50% off!]

Henri has a long commute home from work so trick-or-treating on Halloween night was not going to happen this year. I was a little bummed that we wouldn’t get to experience it BUT Liv is only 3 months old and has noooo clue what is going on so we made the best of it and made plans to celebrate on Saturday. One of the regional parks somewhat near us has a little zoo with California animals and they were hosting a trick-or-treating event on Saturday, the park also has a pumpkin patch all of October so we figured we’d hit both in a quick trip. 

When we arrived at the park we drove around to a few parking lots before we found an open spot, parked, got Liv all dressed in her costume and situated in the stroller. It was her first experience forward facing and she really enjoyed having a good view!

Once she was all ready to go we headed over to the zoo…

… and made a quick pit stop in the pumpkin patch to check it out. It was very busy and all the activities were for older kids so I just snapped a few quick pics of Henri and Liv and we were off to the zoo!

The zoo was so much fun. All of the animals’ cages were decorated with paper chains, carved pumpkins (that the vegetarian animals were munching on as a snack), and some of them even had giant popcicles that looked like candy corn! We made sure to check out all of the animals (its a pretty small zoo) and “trick-or-treated” at some of the stations. 

It was pretty warm out so her costume maybe lasted 5-10 minutes before we took it off and she was just rocking her white onesie. Lavinia is still a bit young to understand the concept of a zoo but she definitely checked out a few of the animals and really enjoyed observing everything going on around her. [even if her face in this picture says differently, haha] 

After about 30 minute at the zoo our little munchkin was pooped out so we loaded up the car and headed to lunch to finish out our Halloween adventure.

On Sunday we got together with Henri’s family to celebrate his grandma’s birthday and a few more pictures of Lavinia in her costume were definitely in order because none of us could get over the cuteness!

Lavinia and the birthday girlAuntie Mo and her unicorn

This girl’s got some serious leg strength

Liv’s favorite part of her costume was getting to chew on the fabric… I think it helped a bit with her teething pain :/ poor girl!

All in all we really enjoyed Lavinia’s first Halloween. We’re already brainstorming ideas for next year’s family coordinated costumes since we couldn’t get it together to all match this year haha

What did you do to celebrate Halloween this year?

Mamas, what were your little ones on their first Halloween?