It’s October . . . and our family loves Halloween! We aren’t fond of haunted houses, creepy skeletons, and dark objects lurking in the corner – no way! We love to decorate, dress up, and make everything fun and whimsical . . . spooky but kooky!

Monsters, the cute and cuddly kind, are a great way to get into the fun Halloween spirit. I Need My Monster is a very funny book your kids will love! The illustrations are breathtaking and the plot is both lighthearted and meaningful. We also recently discovered MoshiMonsters.com. It’s a free website in which your child gets to customize their own monster and then decorate their house with items they “buy” from the monster village. Similar to webkinz.com and buildabearville.com, kids explore a fanciful virtual world and full of games and challenges. The games are educational and great practice, the website is intuitive and easy to use, and the experience is a lot of fun!

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Much to my husband’s dismay, my daughter loves ballet! At 5 years old she attended both Giselle and The Nutcracker and loved them. I was thrilled to discover Ballet Under the Stars, a free outdoor performace. I know she will be very excited about attending this performance!

The perfect book to pair with this beautiful event would have to be Lili at Ballet.  This book introduces ballet vocabulary as Lili learns to be a ballerina. It is a very pretty book and will have your little girl up and dancing (if you can get her to stop long enough to read the book . . .  sometimes we have trouble with that).

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I wish I had known about this book and exhibit much earlier! My family loved it, and it is too good of an activity to pass up! Nightly Night, Noah: An Ark Alphabet is a beautiful book. It’s sweet, vibrant, engaging, and perfect for bedtime. Large, framed illustrations from the book are hung on the exhibit wall, and my husband and I would both love to have them in our home.

The book is featured at “Read Me a Picture,” an exhibit at Tempe Center for the Arts. We badly needed a break in the middle of a very hectic Saturday. The entire experience was like a breath of fresh air. We would trade off taking the kids around to see all of the illustrations and snuggling up with a child in one of their chairs to read one of the stories on display. We almost had the place to ourselves. It was cool and quiet and the kids loved the “make your own book” project! You have to move quickly but both the book and the exhibit are a must see!

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Celebrate National Grandparents Day! Nothing makes our kids happier than a day with one of their grandparents. Grandmas and Grandpas bring constant excitement, joy, and love into our lives. Not to mention that they are the best babysitter’s on earth, and we would be lost without them!

My Granny’s Purse is a fantastically fun book celebrating this wonderful relationship between grandparents and their grandkids.

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