The Baker's Blog: Halloween and Closing out Legoland

I thought I posted this one a few weeks back, sorry for the delay...

Halloween in Billund did not disappoint! This year a group of volunteers pulled together to plan a big American style Halloween party for the town. There ended up being over 250 kids with their families and the costumes were amazing. Several families volunteered to set up trick or treat stations with various themes and local businesses supplied candy to hand out. There was a costume parade (Evelynn may have taken the stage twice, she couldn't get enough 😄), dance floor full of sugared fueled kids, and a pumpkin carving contest. Evelynn requested us to dress in Frozen themed costumes. We lucked out with a great find online for Joel to be Olaf (the snowman), I pulled together some random brown clothes and fur to be Sven (the reindeer) and the girls went as Elsa and Anna. Several kids flocked to Joel once we arrived...I mean who can resist a giant friendly snowman. He also was asked to take a photo with a random person at the bus station, so I'd say his costume was a hit!

Our awesome friends, Mike and Karen, offered to watch our girls after the Billund Halloween party so that Joel and I could take the bus out to Vejle for another party with some of his co-workers. We were so grateful to get out for the night and on top of that they came prepared to sleep over with their one year old in a house that didn't have power through half of it. So the story on the power situation...the previous owner of the house we are renting decided to have an alarm system put in (for reasons we are not sure of since we live at the end of a cul-de-sac in a very small, safe town)...our landlord had the system disabled, but somehow the alarm was still going off occasionally. Usually we could quickly turn it off with a code, but this particular Saturday it kept activating for no reason. After a phone call with the landlord who was at a wedding in a town about 1.5 hours away, he said pull the battery out of the wall for the alarm system and if that doesn't work start cutting wires. Well, to cut the story short (pun intended), after Joel snipped a few wires, shocked himself and power was went out on half the house (or so we thought)...a few days later, we found out he did cut the correct cord, it just caused a power surge and the fuse box disabled that side of the house. Anyway, that made for an interesting few days. Back to the Halloween party...the second party we went to did not disappoint. There were some amazing costumes, as expected since the party was attended by a very talented, creative, design centric group of people. It was nice to put faces to the people Joel works with (although most were covered in costume makeup and I probably won't recognize them next time I see them) and also have a free night from the kids. We shared a cab back to Billund with a few interns who went to the party as American tourists and were back on duty with the kiddos by morning.

Sunday evening, we went to the final opening day for Legoland. They close down for the winter and won't reopen until March 2016. We went on a few rides, including a boat ride where Evelynn and Daphne could be at the wheel. Joel waited in line for hot dogs for 30+ minutes while I watched the kids in the open Duplo play area. After dinner, we headed over to the fireworks show. It was amazing...like 4th of July finale fireworks if they lasted the entire show. Daphne was not a huge fan, but Joel got a good snuggle out of it. It was a really fun night and a good way to end out our busy weekend as a family.

Hope you enjoy all the photos below!