Halloween

This year is the first in a few that we didn't have a Harvest Festival at church. That was nice for me, since I'm usually involved in making the festival happen. So this time we got to relax and go trick-or-treating with the neighbors.

Madeline and Sam dressed up as a cowgirl and cowboy (mostly because they were given boots by some friends) and Abbie dressed up as a fairy (because she was loaned wings by a friend.) Will wore his favorite pirate hat with his graduation gown...I'm not sure what he was. And I wore my normal mom costume. I also made a great taco soup with ground pork, chicken broth, leeks, hominy, diced tomatoes, black beans, bell pepper, chili and cumin. I wanted to make sure we had some kind of healthy protein in us before the candyfest began.

We leashed up the dogs, gathered three of Sam's friends and one of Abbie's and walked the neighborhood. The kids walked/ran about twice as far as me because they kept running back and forth across the street to all the houses. Madeline finally lost the war against thirst and an ensuing cramp, and staggered back home with her candy. We dropped off the little boys and Abbie's friend, and then Will had the brillant idea of driving to the neighborhood next to ours to see what they could do. Boy, was it worth it! Sam and Abbie came home with twice as much candy as Madeline. We separated all chocolate from the candy, and bagged it up in gallon ziplocks. You can see that we now have five gallons of candy in our home. Madeline was kind of bummed that she didn't push through for that extra gallon of candy, but really didn't want it that bad. Sam was allowed to sleep in Abbie's room so that they could barter with each other for favorite pieces. They love to drive a hard bargain, and we had to shut them down about 45 minutes after they went to bed. Sam ended up with the full sized Crunch bar, and Abbie got 5 smaller pieces for that one. I'm hoping that traded more than that, but they were both happy. I finished up the night eating the only non-candy treats: goldfish crackers and pretzles that Abbie got from someone. That, and some Earl Grey tea finished off the night nicely for me. Happy Halloween!