saturday's snaps

Recap of Halloween (and lots of pictures)!

I have never been a big fan of Halloween. It's not the most uplifting of holidays and I really don't like that it's such a kids' holiday, yet there's so much creepy, gory, really honestly yucky stuff. I've never loved the idea of Trick-or-Treating; hated doing it as a child (painfully shy) and could do without all the useless candy around here. I actually considered not celebrating Halloween with my own kids when I became a mom.

But over the last few years, it's really grown on me. Like all holidays, it's completely different really experiencing it through a child's perspective, but it's so much more than that here... and I can't believe I'm saying this, but Halloween is actually becoming one of the nights of the year that I look forward to the most with our kids and with our friends and neighbors.
Here it's like an extra large, incredibly cozy yet giant block party.

Some random guy walking down the street, following his kids trick-or-treating, talking on his cell phone put it best;
We didn't know him... must've been from another neighborhood. But we overheard him,
"You should see this, dude, this is no Hershey's Kiss neighborhood! We've got full size candy bars, popcorn balls, caramel apples, bonfires, the works! This is awesome!"

And he's right. It is awesome. Everyone's out, everyone's friendly, everyone's happy. Houses hand out candy, caramel apples, hot cider and donuts for the parents (and from a couple of our friends, offers of beer!), there are several firebowls going in driveways and a few garages set up as little mini haunted houses for the kids. Friends everywhere.
I thought by the end of our route (even though we only did our street and loop) the kids would be complaining... it was cold, their buckets were HEAVY and their costumes were not the most easy things to walk in. But they were laughing and smiling the whole way. We came home with too much candy and lots of happy Halloween wishes.
Love it!

Here are some of the kids on our corner before all the festivities got started...















And the cutest ones around that night (I think!)















Savannah had been talking about this costume since before last Halloween. She was smitten with the idea, but we didn't quite know how to pull it off, so we nixed it. Well, she talked about it all year, so I decided we had to figure something out. Lo and behold; here she is...





In a Bubble Bath!




























She had a blast and loved her unique costume. So glad we did it after all!






















And Sawyer, the robot:






















Doing a few robot moves...


































complete with flashing lights!





















Again, all his idea.
I kinda wanted to pull off another year of doing a cute pair of costumes together with my kiddos, but I loved that they came up with these ideas themselves and were sooo excited to help think them up and put them all together. It made it so fun and it was very cool to see how proud they were of their costumes out that night!