Halloween..Or What's Left of It

Does anyone know what happened to Halloween? The Halloween that Jason and I have experience with the girls the last few years is a FAR cry from the Halloween we remember. Back in the day, are we that old?, you put on your best costume, you fought over the biggest pillow case in the house, and out you went...on a quest to fill your pillowcase...several times over. In our neighborhoods ALL the houses on the block participated in Halloween, I think we were the only house on the block that turned off the lights and played 'not home,' but that was only until we hit a few houses, took the candy back to our house and 'recycled it,' knowing good and well there was NO WAY we could ever eat all the candy we would get before it went bad or our stomachs just plain rejected it. Now, you are lucky if every 5th house has their porch light on and has candy. Seriously people??? Have they all become the Halloween Grinch or has all this 'tampered candy' BS gotten the best of people and Halloween has turned into "Trunk-or-Treat," or Halloween at the mall. What might be worse than that is the few people we did see out and about were being DRIVEN around. Really people we are THAT lazy, that we won't walk with our kids house to house??

I dream of a day where all the houses on the block have their front porch lights on and candy in a bowl. Where we will walk down the street and bump into lots of littles, and bigs, decked out in costumes. Half the fun of Halloween is seeing all the other kiddos dressed up. We saw....5, seriously 5 other kids in 2.5 hours and NONE of those 5 were walking they were all being escorted in air conditioned SUV's. Alright I'll stop and move on; I just had to get that out.

Yesterday marked the first of a long line of End of the Year Holidays and we started it out right. Every Halloween must start with a pumpkin carving or painting, and painting we did.

















Apparently the deer, which are abundant around here, have a real sweet tooth for pumpkins, luckily I got the memo from the moms at the playgroup and after our pumpkin dried we promptly brought them inside to save them from becoming lunch.

Who were the cutest kiddos on the block??? Why these precious Mermaids, of course!





I think it took Jericho maybe 3 houses to figure out this candy business. She was a MONSTER in the candy bowl. Try explaining to a 15 month old that the polite thing to do is let them offer you the candy not to reach both hands into the bowl and grab as much as you can. Lucky for Jericho everyone thought she was TOO cute and were thrilled to give her gobs of candy.



At first Blythe was leading the way, walking up and knocking on the door, but before too long Jericho was giving her a run for her money.













Luckily the girls are too young to realize how lame Halloween has really become and instead were completely smitten with the idea that all you have to do is knock on the door say Trick-Or-Treat and get fist full’s of candy!

I have HIGH expectations for you next year Halloween...I hope you can raise the bar.