Halloween 2017

This year's costumes consisted of Alakazam, a psychic 
Pokémon, and a cardboard box.  Anders and Anna created the costume for his Pokémon costume (with a tiny bit of help from me) and Anna and Kuba created the box costume - equipped with a built in helmet to make it easy to wear.  

Things we had to buy: Duct tape, rubber dishwashing gloves, and yellow spray paint.  Everything else we collected from around the house, or picked up for free.

That's my kind of costume making.    Anna got really into it...as usual.  Which amped up everyone's excitement.    

The kids were really excited about their costumes again this year.  Though I don't know that walking up and down steps with a giant box on your head was that easy.  It reminded me of Anders giant blue whale costume from 8 years ago.  

This was the year Anders set off on his own and trick or treated with his middle school friends.  Anna and I went out with Kuba and a bunch of his third grade friends and their families.    They both came home with a boat load of candy.

         

(Anna hard at work....her architectural skills sure do come in handy) 

(They boys ready for trick or treating) 

(Kuba and Mousy....not so helpful) 

Loss

I've been putting together a video for Kuba's tenth birthday - which is nearly upon us, and I've been scouring through everything I can find to round up photo's of him and I've been desperately searching for video too.    Recently I found out almost all of our photo's (day one of babies until recently) are gone.  We had loaded everything onto an external hard drive for "safe keeping" and better storage.    The external hard drive was dropped and everything on it is gone.    Wiped out.    Magnetic dust.

Luckily,  I have kept this blog and I have Facebook and have some photos on google and in the iCloud.    This is the only thing that has kept me from nonstop weeping. 
However - it doesn't really touch the grief I have felt after finding out we lost everything that was on this external drive. 

What is most painful is the loss of all the video I took of the boys when they were little.
And almost all of the photo's I took of Kuba when he was a small boy...birth to age 4 were on there.    I happened to have already made a ten year birthday video for Anders, so I had captured his range of photo's from birth to ten, so I was luckier there.  

Words cannot describe my sadness and sense of loss.