Halloween 2014

This is a guest post by Eliza that I thought I'd posted ages ago - sorry! (I've decided I need some help from my kids if I'm going to be able to keep our family journal on this blog up to date! And it's great seeing things through the kids' eyes.)

Halloween was awesome! We started off with our fourth annual neighborhood Halloween party! 

Here are most of the kids in our neighborhood - there were some pretty sweet costumes!

While we were waiting for everyone to get there, we played some Halloween games like pumpkin-pumpkin ghost (duck, duck goose) 

Then it was time for the parade. We marched up and down our street. The kids had so much fun showing off their costumes, and stopping at a few houses along the way for candy (that's Silas in the front as Harry Potter - doesn't he look different with dark hair?). 

 I had tons of fun with the neighborhood girls.

 Then we came back for some black bean soup. We've had this soup for dinner on Halloween my whole life and it's delicious and the whole neighborhood loves it - even all the littlest kids. It looks really Halloweeny with it's black color. And on top we put sour cream (to represent a ghost) and cheddar cheese (to represent the pumpkins and orange of Halloween). Here's the recipe (we have it lots - not just at Halloween)

Then, all the kids gathered around as one of my friend's dad breathed fire!! it was really cool to watch. I'm not sure how he did it. 

Then the party was over and we went our separate ways for trick-or-treating. Oliver and Silas dressed up as Harry Potter and a ninja. They went trick-or-treating around the neighborhood with some friends.

I dressed up as a cheerleader. I got this costume from my aunt Charity. This was her real cheer leading costume in high school! I went to North Ogden for trick-or-treating with my friends. We went to a lot of big houses, and got lots of candy.

 

Isaac dressed up as a Mexican wrestler. My mom got this mask when they went to Mexico a while ago. He was going to wear my friends gold short shorts instead of my running shorts but she couldn't find her gold shorts to let Isaac borrow them so my running shorts had to do. He still looked awesome though. Isaac was super nice and took some of our little neighbors trick-or-treating. They think he's the best.

Ashton dressed up as a gorilla-he scared a lot of little kids at the neighborhood party! He went trick-or-treating with his friend who dressed up as Deadpool.

After we all got back, we laid out our candy and sorted it - that's our tradition. We traded some also. All of the candy that no one really liked that much we put in a pile for to the "Candy Fairy" who will trade it out for other things, like puzzles or toys (I don't think she actually gave us anything this year but we didn't really want that candy anyway so I guess we just forgot about it - but she always came when we were little!).

We finished off the night by watching a scary movie - Young Sherlock Holmes. It was really good and scary - but not toooooo scarey. And then we watched Gremlins the next night. It was a good scary show.

It was the best Halloween ever!