Halloween

We had a great time on Halloween! Halloween fell on a Saturday this year so festivities began at the kids' schools on Friday. John's preschool held a costume parade Friday morning and Amelia had a pumpkin decorating contest and class picnic at her school later that day. While these activites were much fun, our highlight this year was celebrating with neighbors at our block party on Saturday. We completely shut our street down around 5:00 p.m. so that the neighbors can commence for eating and drinking at our block party prior to trick-or-treating. All together we have 30-40+ children on our block (abut 40 homes), so the energy level is quite amazing as all of the children are running around, excited to be dressed up in their costumes, while the adults are enjoying visiting during this time.

Here are a few photos of Amelia and John in their Halloween costumes just before we went across the street to the block party. Amelia dressed as a cowgirl for Halloween and John was Spiderman.

For this shot, I asked for the children to act like the person they were dressed as. Amelia conformed to my request with her sassy cowgirl look and John complied by growling from beneath his mask. Who knew that Spiderman growled, but apparently he does.

Once it was dusk, the four of us set out for trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. This was a lot of fun! John in particular was pretty funny in the way he made it a point to say to nearly each house, "Happy Halloween! Trick-or-treat! I like your decorations!" By the time we made it down the block adjacent to ours and back again, the kids were ready to call it quits and begin handing out candy to the other kids. I honestly think that perhaps they enjoy handing out candy more than receiving it during trick-or-treating.

On Sunday, the morning after Halloween, I ran a half-marathon race here in Dallas so I was up and out of the house early. When I arrived home from my run on Sunday morning I found the children engaged in an amusing activity. Amelia was the leader in this, I'm sure, and what the kids were doing was sorting their candy into piles by color. And then they put each color of candy in a Ziploc baggie, so that each kid had over a dozen baggies full of color-sorted candy. Think of this as the brown bag contatining M&Ms and Tootsie Rolls, the yellow bag containing Dum Dums and Milk Duds, etc. Amelia and John were so proud of their sorting, and I was so happy (relieved) from having successfully completed my race that we all felt this was a proud morning for the Wilson household.

Below is the stash. We are still enjoying it over a week later! The kids think they are the only ones eating their candy, but I sneak a piece every now and then.