Parenthood - 2015-10-31 Halloween

October 31, 2015

It appears that Halloween is the first time we have all posed together for a family portrait since Amelia was born, and Amelia's costume obstructs her face, so I'm not sure it counts. Shocking! We don't have too many photos of just the three kids together either. Clearly we are falling down on our paparazzi duties...

In any case, our neighbours got into decorating and the kids loved it except for the climbing tree getting wrapped in spider web. Which apparently offended Matthew and Elizabeth's sensibilities so much that we had to discuss Halloween decorations every. single. time. we went outside. Matthew liked the spiders though and made me take out several extremely disgusting books about spiders from the library. Actually I at first told him that I didn't know where the spider books were (true), thinking that we could go back to checking out books about tractors and babies (previous obsessions). But my kids both know their way around the library and he just marched over to Susan the librarian and demanded spider books. "Stories about spiders, or real spiders?" she asked. "WEAL spiders. BIG spiders!" he elaborated. Auntie Karen should stay out of that section, is all I'm saying. I dreamt about baby tarantulas all night that bedtime.

Ahem. Back to Halloween. Auntie Yukiko gifted us with a set for carving pumpkins before she left for Japan and we have now tested it out. It makes it so much easier! The haunted house turned out very well, I thought, though I personally had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Elizabeth had skating in the morning and didn't want to be gymnastics girl on skates (plus the costume would not have fit over the coat, I don't think). So she was a bunny. Elf Auntie Janice went to work with prosthetic ears she actually glued on. She made them herself. Matthew was slightly concerned they might not come off again.

We had pumpkin stroganoff for supper, as per tradition. Then the kids all went trick-or-treating at 5:30pm and half the street was all out (because suddenly there are a ton of tiny kids) and being all - don't go to my house until I get home but make sure you stop by! We met several new neighbours which was cool except I'm not sure that they'll recognize me next time without the toddler costume on my head. Matthew was pretty excited to get candy but after about five houses he was all "time to go home and start eating this". Elizabeth made him keep going for a few houses because she wanted to visit her friend's house across the street, but eventually he insisted he was done.

Then Daddy and Elizabeth dashed off to Adi's neighbourhood to do some more serious trick-or-treating and Matthew got into the candy... I mean ... went to bed early... We might have run out of candy and dealt with it by handing out some of the candy collected earlier by my children. Despite this we did not have a candy shortage the next morning. Elizabeth proudly announced to her Sunday school class that she ate candy for breakfast and didn't have to brush her teeth afterwards. Whoops!