Trick-or-Treat

We made it home safely from vacation yesterday evening. Over the next several days I'll try to post some pictures and comments from our trip.

I erroneously thought the kids would forget about carving pumpkins since we were on vacation right up to Halloween day. Not so. Tyler woke up this morning and wanted to know when we were going to carve our pumpkins. So, we drove around town this afternoon looking for a store that had pumpkins left. On our way to the store, we drove by the “Halloween House” – a house in our town that is very well decorated. They have a cemetery in their yard, every window is boarded up, and they have huge spiders and black birds all over the place. It’s very well done. They added a Frankenstein recently. As we drove by, Danielle said, “There’s Frankenstein!” Tyler saw an elderly man with a walker strolling along the sidewalk and added, “And there’s Frankenstein with a walker!” He cracked himself up with that one. Anyway, we dodged rain drops and splashed in puddles, only to realize there were no pumpkins left anywhere! Then I remembered the farm where we picked strawberries this summer.

I crossed my fingers and headed out to the farm. The sign out front said “See you next season” and there weren’t any cars in the parking lot. I pulled in anyway and saw two women inside the little store, packing away items. Fortunately their debit/credit card machine was still hooked up! We found the perfect pumpkins and hurried home to carve them before trick-or-treating.

Danielle had no problem sticking her dainty little hands in the pumpkin and pulling out its guts. Tyler was a bit squeamish, though. Once they were gutted, both kids drew faces on their pumpkins – all by themselves. We helped them cut the faces out, but they designed these without our help. I thought they turned out great! Danielle picked out a “baby pumpkin” today, too. She let Ron carve a face on that one. We had a Daddy, Mommy, and Baby pumpkin family to great our trick-or-treaters.

The kids were so excited to go trick-or-treating tonight. Ron took the kids out while I stayed home to pass out candy. I thought the cutest trick-or-treaters were my own, of course! After being out for an hour, the kids came home to help me hand out candy. They seemed to enjoy that just as much as collecting the candy. At one point Tyler picked up a huge handful of candy and dropped it in a little boy’s bag. Tyler said, “I’m giving you a lot of candy so you can go home and get sick tonight!” After the flow of kids slowed a bit, we moved inside to hand out the candy. Someone with a scary mask knocked at the door. When Tyler opened the door, Danielle looked out, yelled “AAHHHH!” and ran in the other room to hide. It was more humorous than alarming. The kids ate as much candy as they could (“Just ONE more piece!”) until I hurried them upstairs to brush their teeth and head to bed. Despite all the candy, they quickly passed out when their little heads hit their pillows. It was a good Halloween.