Halloween 2011

I’ve been looking forward to this Halloween for years. With Halloween falling on Sunday last year we resorted to attending a trunk-or-treat at the church the night before. And in 2009 we were traveling on Halloween. Again we attended a trunk-or-treat, this time with Justin’s sister, but I’m not a fan of trunk-or-treats and will be fine if we never go to another. Traditional door-to-door trick-or-treating in my opinion IS what makes Halloween.

Our ward did have a party on Saturday night, but thankfully they left the trick-or-treating to the neighborhoods and instead planned some fun activities and a yummy chili dinner. We were one of the very last families to leave the activity… it took that long for Abigail to get up the nerve to try to eat a donut dangling from a string – an activity she’d been eyeing all evening. By some small miracle they were able to convince Justin to give it a try as well.

For Halloween we had Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.

We finally found Abigail this costume 30 minutes before our ward party on Saturday night. I learned a few things from this experience. #1 plan ahead in the future and #2 costume stores are borderline porn shops. I’ll never again let my children browse though the racks looking for costumes. Finding something modest for a young girl is next to impossible.

The witch that Abigail wore several years

found new life this year

This is Carly’s “scary” face.

Jason was about as practical as possible wearing his glow-in-the-dark skeleton PJs.

I saw these on a friend’s blog last year and loved them – so when I saw them in Old Navy a few months ago I had to buy a pair for both Jason and Katie. They are so fun and I love tucking them in bed with their little bones a glowing.

Katie was our adorable little piglet. She LOVED her costume.

Carly also wore this costume when she was Katie’s age.

We decided to start out trick-or-treating around our neighborhood. This was Katie’s first year participating and she was so fun to watch. She had a hard time keeping up with her older siblings, especially with all the stairs she had to climb.

Katie quickly caught on that each time she walked up to someone’s door they would let her take candy (sometimes she’d continue taking candy until we intervened). Katie has such a limited vocabulary that she never really even said anything – people just gave her candy for looking so cute. The most excited she got was when she was given a bag of goldfish. She carried the bag of goldfish around the rest of the evening.

Abigail met up with a friend and we ended up walking around the neighborhood with her and her parents. Katie enjoyed walking around just about as much as she did going up to the doors.

Because our neighborhood isn’t very big yet, we didn’t anticipate the kids getting much candy. We were surprised to find there were several families out trick-or-treating and many houses gave out bags full of goodies.

I had told the kids that after we walked around our little neighborhood I would drive them to a more populated area for more trick-or-treating. So after dropping off Katie and Justin at home we went back out for more. We went to an area where several ward members live and ran into Carly’s friend and her Mom. It made the evening even more enjoyable to be with friends. I was shocked when we got home and I saw how much the kids had collected in such a short amount of time. This goes against everything I’ve previously believed, but I have to admit it, there really is such a thing as too much candy.

Out of curiosity I weighed Abigail’s bowl of candy yesterday and she has 10 pounds! This isn’t the cheap candy either. Carly likely has just as much and Jason not far behind (he got tuckered out as we were trick-or-treating our way back to the car). When you take into consideration that Abigail, Jason, and Katie can’t even eat half of what they have… I’m overwhelmed - we’ve officially made up for the disappointing Halloween’s of years past.