Trunk or Treat

We had a tri-ward Trunk or Treat/Halloween carnival last night. It was quite the shindig, though not quite what I've grown accustomed to. The outdoor carnival was okay: bowling with small pumpkins and orange spray-painted 2-liter bottles, fishing for rubber duckies, face painting, donut-eating contest, etc. The girls had little interest in most of it, and had more fun running in circles on the grass. We ate corndogs and carrot sticks and wandered through the crowd to find people we knew so I could show off how cute my kids were. I meant to take a picture of the chaos that was the carnival, the turnout was bigger than any I'd ever been to, since it was 3 wards instead of just one.

As usual, Cadence refused to pose long enough for me to get a decent shot of her costume, so here's the picture I managed to snag when I first completed the project. She was so ecstatic when I finished it. We had to hide it from her to keep it in one piece. Now that it's her to do as she likes, she's been carrying it around in her Strawberry Shortcake trick or treating bag all day long:

Megan was SUPPOSED to be Lemon Meringue to match Cadence's costume (which got rave reviews, by the way), but the jacket I was making just wasn't working out. So last minute, we went costume shopping and found the most adorable Little Red Riding Hood costume. She looked 200% adorable. I may be biased in saying so, but she really, really did. The pictures I got didn't do her justice. Everyone who saw her, even complete strangers, just squealed in delight over how adorable she was.
Cadence did get her face painted and even managed to avoid touching it long enough to let most of it dry. If you peek in the back of this picture, you'll notice James trying to lure Megan out of the bushes she was obsessed with going into. Thankfully, they were pretty dense, so she never got more than an arm in before we grabbed her away from them.
The trunk or treat portion of the night was fantastic. I'm used to maybe 15-20 cars participating. This one had closer to 50 (if not more), since all three wards sat out. We started out early before all of the cars opened their trunks, but we did get a nice stash going (filled one of my mixing bowls, at least). Megan was quick to catch on to the idea of "open my bag and people give me candy". It fascinated her. Cadence caught on to the idea of "get candy, move on to the next one", but we frequently had to drag Megan away as she constantly asked for or reached for seconds. Most people indulged her (probably because she's so cute) but we tried very hard to discourage it. Anyway, they didn't fill their bags, but they had about 3-4 inches deep of candy going before we put an end to it (with many protests) and were content to munch on M&Ms on the way home.
Anyway, doubt we'll go trick-or-treating in our neighborhood this year. I'm not even sure our neighborhood does it. We're the only ones on the block with pumpkins set out. We're prepared with a big bag of mixed chocolate, just in case, but I bought it with the mindset of "if nobody comes, at least it's something we'll eat", since last year we ended up with a big bag of dumdums that eventually got thrown out (since our neighbors sat outside blocking the walkway to both our apartments to hand out their candy, so nobody squeezed past them to come to ours on Halloween).