This is Halloween

Boys and girls of every age

Wouldn't you like to see something strange?
Come with us and you will see
This, our town of Halloween

I love that song from the "Nightmare Before Christmas". I think a part of my affection for the song stems from 8th Grade Show Choir, when we sang the song with flashlights under our face being turned on and off in a choreographed fashion. So very cool to a 13 year old...

Anyway, it is Saturday night, so the bulk of our Halloween activities are coming to an end. Tomorrow night we'll be handing out candy to the plethora of kids that live in our complex (and perhaps a few complexes over). We've got a skeleton on our door and pumpkins on our porch. So it's not completely over, but it's mostly there.

The girls have enjoyed three different parties. First a small playgroup get together, where the girls ate brownies and cookies at 10 in the morning and "trick or treated" down a hallway with all of three doors. The girls were dressed up as pirates. Cadence is technically wearing a "boys costume", but she's such a doll in it! And Megan looks precious in the pirate princess costume we'd initially bought for Cadence:

Anyway, Friday night we crashed Nana's ward's Halloween party. This was a fairly late start for a party, so the girls didn't do as well. They enjoyed the dinner and Cadence was happy to get a small bit of candy in her pail. She was tired, though, so we only made it once through the line (goodness knows there was enough candy to make it through multiple times before they even came close to running out) before we escaped.

Then tonight, we went to our own ward's party. This one started much earlier, which was convenient. Except Cadence went down for her nap late and we had to wake her up in order to be late for the party. Still, once she got to fish for some tootsie rolls, she was in a pretty good mood. Plus, they served hot dogs, which is always a favorite of hers.

She was much more awake and happy for tonight's trunk or treat, though she still threw a fit that we were steering her towards it (some days she refuses to go where we want her to go, just out of spite). Once we got to the first car and she was given a sucker, she calmed down. We got to the second car and she happily ate her sucker while I trick or treated for her. By the fourth or fifth car, she realized that when I held out her hand with the bucket people put more candy in there for her. By the end of our first trip through the cars, she was happily holding out her bucket with one hand and impatiently pointing to the empty space inside with the others until the people put candy in her bucket. She even insisted on two helpings from the bishop. She was also not shy about showing her disapproval of what one person chose to put in her bucket by taking it out, dropping it unceremoniously on the ground, and walking on to the next car.

So, tonight, we retire the costumes. I'll probably hold on to them until next year, just in case. But they'll most likely be replaced with new ideas. What fun is re-using costumes, after all? Maybe we'll just toss them in a bucket to become dress-up clothes.