Halloween

Because Halloween fell on a Saturday this year, we got two days straight of the holiday with the school celebrations on Friday and then trick-or-treating the next night. Kiera, Soren and Matteo had their Halloween party at preschool on Friday morning and then parents were invited to Oliver's school at the end of the day for their Halloween parade.  Oliver and I finished the evening with a party at a fellow host family's house.  The back staircase of the their three-story home was turned into a haunted house.  We kept climbing up and up through the darkened staircase where there was a surprise for us around every twist and turn.  It was quite phenomenal. 

On Saturday afternoon I took the kids up to their grandparent's house to show off the costumes.  Grandma and Grandpa made an appropriate fuss over them.

It rained on and off much of the afternoon and I kept checking the forecast in hopes it would clear up in time because I had four kids bouncing off the walls desperate for it to be time to go trick-or-treating.  We held them off until darkness fell, it quit raining and out the door we went!

I wasn't sure how much Matteo and Kiera would like Halloween since there's  a lot that can scare a little kid, and Oliver and Soren didn't necessarily get caught up in the hype at that age, but they really enjoyed themselves.  Although they really couldn't say "trick or treat," they did understand that if they held out their bags, someone would drop candy in them and of course they liked that!  And then they were off tailing their brothers to the next house.

We continued down our street and back up the other side and visited some of our favorite neighbors along the way.  The boys eventually got tired and wanted to go back home to count their loot, so Kiera, Celina and I continued on with our next-door-neighbors to check out the crazy Halloween decorations some of the houses in our neighborhood have up.  The weather I had been so worried about ended up providing the perfect backdrop to Halloween with a mist that shrouded the neighborhood.  

Chris' bat and Dracula pumpkins flanked Celina's Tinkerbell.