Halloween 2010

The kids are of the age now when Halloween is a much anticipated evening!  They have been counting down for days.  Fancy found her costume at Disney's Animal Kingdom this summer, so she has been ready for a while.  Rella has a fascination with cheerleaders (not sure where that came from), so when we found a sparkly blue cheer dress a couple months ago, she had to have it.  Hi-Hat is loving Calvin and Hobbs these days and he decided to dress as Calvin.  Hi-Hat is the one who ends up with a homemade costume each year, and what seemed like a simple costume this year turned out to be a little more complicated in the end.  We found the striped shirt, black pants, classic red sneakers, and hair spiking glue, but I thought it needed a little something more to make it more obvious who he was.  Here's what we came up with:

I poured over C&H cartoon strips and found a cute Halloween one, and then I had to spend an afternoon playing cartoonist to draw the cartoon onto foam board.  My artwork got Hi-Hat's seal of approval, so that was good enough for me!

And here are my girls:

It's funny how when you're not at Disney World, people mistake leopard-print Mickey ears for just plain leopard ears - "are you a leopard? are you a brownie? are you a leopard-keeping leopard?"

I suppose an Animak Kingdom trainer is a little less than obvious.

with the boys next door 

with the girls next next door

Chomping at the bit for 5:45 to get here!

I think they figured that if they just went out and got started, we would have to declare that trick-or-treating had begun 

 They hit a few houses together, but quickly split up with neighbors into boys and girls

buddies 

I had to check in a few times to be sure that Rella obeyed the signs and "only took 2."

our jack-o-lantern at dusk 

our jack-o-lantern in the dark 

Fancy being attacked by the "vampire slayer" from next door

I think more than anything my kids like coming back to the house and passing out candy for the rest of the evening.  This year they kept grabbing handfuls and meeting the kids on the sidewalk before they could even make it to our yard, so we pulled out a table and benches and let them set up the candy in the yard.  We are full roadside service around here!  I'm pretty sure we had more than 300 kids come by this year.