Tonight was our 2nd annual Star Party and our Halloween Potluck. We invited the mom’s group that I belong to, along with our friends from across the valley.  Pics and the first part of the video linked below.

I couldn’t have done any of this without the help of the awesome Ashley, Ashley and Zel. (Yes, 2 Ashley’s, with the same last initial, I still haven’t found a good nickname for them to differentiate them, so we’ll go with Ashley 1, and Ashley 2.

Ashley 1, our group leader, made an awesome cake (2 actually) of Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein.

Ashley 2 lent us a HUGE bouncy-house, and tables/chairs for the event! The kids loved the bouncy house and it was great to have a place for everyone to sit and eat this year, last year we didn’t have tables/chairs so that was such a big help!

Zel came out and helped me pack up all the goody-bags for the kids, (30 bags!) and helped me build the Candy HayDive and hide all the pumpkins for the pumpkin hunt. Her oldest daughter kept an eye on Lilly and Zel’s little one so that we could get everything done.

We took 2 bales of straw and at least 14 big bags of individually wrapped candy (skittles, nerds, smarties, lollipops, tootsi rolls, gummy things, a bunch of stuff) and we layered all the candy into it and put it in a big pile. I think all bags totalled, there were probably 400+ pieces of candy or more, not really sure, and I’m pretty sure the kids didn’t get all of it. I’ll be going out tomorrow to find out what’s buried and was missed.

We started at first by sending in the 4 youngest who were lined up, and at first, I’m pretty sure they didn’t believe us that there was candy in there… until they started finding it. Then they started to get excited.

I realized that there was a lot of hay in there and giving 4-5 kids at a time only 5 minutes just wouldn’t give them much for their bags, so spur of the moment I sent everyone in. The results were hilarious.

We had hay flying everywhere, the pile got smooshed pretty quickly into one layer about 4-5 inches deep across one of our stalls (our stalls are huge). We even had one kid doing a “Hay-Angel” in it for awhile.

I took 20 minutes of video before turning off the camera, and the kids were still going long after that! The kids played in it for at least an hour if not more, and later on in the night they were in there again. Cassandra even brought out a spare bag she had in her car and started throwing it in to get them rolling again. It was a total hoot!

It was a great night, after all the candy-hunting settled down and everyone ate, Ray broke out the telescopes and started pulling up the constellations, the Orion Nebula, and Jupiter and it’s 4 moons. I ended up back inside with Lilly and missed out on that part of things (and on everyone leaving) but still, I’d say all in all, it was a success.