Halloween

As the kids put it, "this was the BEST Halloween EVER!"

We had a great week of Halloween festivities and it was fun to see the kids so excited about everything. But I have to wonder how Halloween became such a huge deal. I thought it was fun and exciting enough back when I was a kid and Halloween just meant being in the school Halloween parade and going trick-or-treating that evening. Now there are Halloween parties and festivities galore and the kids often don their costumes many times throughout the week prior to Halloween and are handed candy at every turn day after day! It's a bit much, in my opinion. But it's so fun to see the kids' delight in being someone entirely different for a night and knocking on the doors of complete strangers, finding kind people with wonderful treats behind each door. The twins were especially delighted to find a dog behind a lot of the doors. If there was a dog, they didn't even care about the candy - just wanted to know the name of the dog and pet it for a few minutes.

Monday night we carved pumpkins (after our neighborhood fall social that I was in charge of - it went great but ended up being a pretty full evening with two big activities. I'm looking forward to this week when there won't even be one big activity a day!).

The finished products

They looked pretty awesome all lit up (see Liza inside?)

Tuesday night was our annual adult Halloween party. We had a great time playing Guesstures and Taboo and eating lots of good food and just enjoying some non-kid time.

Jared and I as 80's Prom Sweethearts
(picture a corsage on my wrist to get the full idea)
That's the dress I actually wore to Jr Prom.
It was a little baggy back in high school - not anymore!

Ready to head out trick-or-treating!

The twins were so happy to be super heroes -
insisted on wearing their costumes from last year - fine by me!
Ashton was a rock star. He wasn't going for any particular rock star but he ended up looking quite a lot like Billy Idol (and a little like Kiss with that star around his eye and his tongue out).
He had so much fun with his costume.
Trick-or-treating with some friends

Sorting out all the loot - one of the kids' favorite parts of Halloween - making trades, creating a pile in the middle of everything they don't really like that no one else wants
to trade for to give to the "Halloween Fairy" who gives them a toy in return.
Grandfather showed up at this point in the evening and they were SO excited to see him!