Halloween Recap

 Better late than never, right?  Halloween was fun, but really cold this year. I dressed the kids in two layers, and I bought them mittens - which they actually wore!

 A fews before Halloween, we went over to our neighbor's house to carve pumpkins.

 The kids all thought this dancing skeleton was awesome!

 I carved Elmo, James carved a smiley face.

 Eva Kate was agreeable to sit in Frankenstein's lap for a photo, but Samuel wasn't. He was unsure.

The kids ate a hot dog for dinner, along with a few pieces of candy.  I put them to bed after they got too cold, and I grabbed the baby monitor and went back outside.  We had about 200 trick-or-treaters, and while we didn't have any candy left, we did have some stickers and apple cider left.

Here's some of the decorations from our street:

 Our house:

 We usually put our big screen up over the garage to show this movie, but it was too windy outside. We were afraid that the wind would rip the screen, so James just projected in onto the garage door.

Halloween Fun

We took the kids to the pumpkin patch at Rombachs Farm yesterday. Samuel had fun looking at the pumpkins, and he chose a few small ones to bring home.

 My mom made that orange hat for Samuel last year, and it still fits him. He wore it for while, but he took it off. It fit Eva as well. She got sleepy while we were there.

I think this tunnel was his favorite thing there.

We dressed up as a family and went to Grant's Farm last night. We enjoyed it. The place was decorated for Halloween & they had a DJ there. We saw some of the animals too.

The Mad Hatter, Red Queen, White Rabbit, and a "Talking" Flower.

I tried to get Samuel to dance with me, but he was too busy people watching.

Halloween 2012

Halloween is a big event on our street. Most of the neighbors decorate their houses, and some of the adults dress up. Someone grills hot dogs for the kids, and we give those out for free. James' brother and his wife came to visit this year for Halloween, and it was great having them here. We had fun. The weekend before Halloween, I made up 300 little baggies with candy inside. Last year, we just left the candy loose in a bowl, and we had trouble with kids taking two fistfuls of candy.  The baggies prevented that, but we still ran out. We had over three hundred trick-or-treaters. We started giving out punch last year, and we did it again this year. We gave out about 4 gallons last year, so that is what I prepared for this year, thinking we might not have as many trick-or-treaters since Halloween was on a Wednesday.  I was wrong. We ran out. The last batch was lemonade, because that is all we had left in the house to mix up.  We gave out 6 and 1/2 gallons of punch, and had none left. I think we had more trick-or-treaters than we've had before. We had to turn a few kids away.

We stuck with our Alice in Wonderland theme from last Halloween, and we added The White Rabbit to the mix:

 Alice, the King of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, and the Queen of Hearts.

 Our next door neighbor usually dresses up as Frankenstein, and but he was called out of town for work. I had a number of kids ask where he was. I even had one kid mournfully tell he that he was so sad that Frankenstein was not home. 

 Here's a pic from last year:

 We played Tim Burton's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland on our outdoor screen.

 Our front porch:

A couple of pics from the neighbors' yards:

Halloween '08

This Halloween was the first time we booth dressed up for it since we met - 10 years ago. Lily was scared of James. After he put his costume on, she ran under our bed and would not some out. Almost every on out street and their yard decorated, and at about 5 pm, some of our neighbors blocked out our road so no cars could drive down. In front of our house, their were tables with buckets of candy for the kids, grilled hot dogs for everyone, and snacks and punch. I think we gave out about 200 hot dogs. There was music, and some had a skeleton that danced to "Super Freak."

James had fun as the grim reaper. There is a weeping willow tree at the beginning of our street, and he would hide behind its branches and come out when people walked by.


This is a pirate ship that one of our neighbors puts together every year for Halloween. It has moving parts and Christmas lights on it. He hooks it up to his truck and gets a generator to run lights and motors and drives in around the neighborhood.



This was the scene in front of our house. We didn't have a lot of decorations, so we went to the nearest Halloween store and bought some things on clearance to use for next year. I have more pictures posted here.