Halloween

Halloween was pretty fun this year. Dylan definitely grasps the trick-or-treat concept now and was looking forward to it for a month. He played with his pumpkin bucket for several weeks and wanted to wear his costume every day. Of course, by the time Halloween came around, I had to bribe him to get in his costume and the pumpkin bucket was gone. I had to send Marcos to the store to get a candy container of some sort at the very last minute--literally 30 minutes before we were supposed to start trick-or-treating. Oh, and we tried several times to get our pumpkins carved and something always stood in our way....fussy, grumpy, tired. So we gave up and only had gutted pumpkins this year. What happened to our holiday spirit?

We got everything ready and went over to the church for their annual "trunk-or-treat". Dylan had a great time and loved that his friends were there to trick-or-treat with too. Plus, it's kind of nice to have the process over with in about a half hour. The good part was it was great weather and because of the later daylight savings time, it wasn't dark yet, which was a definite plus...last year was so dark and cold. If you're wondering about little Preston and his crazy Papi, yes, he loves being held upside down and yes, it's a common occurence. My kids wouldn't know what to do with themselves if we didn't treat them like monkeys. It's second nature to them. I have to say that it was kind of bitter-sweet trunk-or-treating. A lot of our friends who used to be in the ward were there and it's just so hard to think that they're not in the ward anymore. We're getting used to the changes (although it's hard to meet any of the new people being stuck in Primary) but it's just not the same yet. I guess we're in that transitional phase right now. Anyway, trunk-or-treating was fun...

After that, we went up to Mom and Barney's house for a little party. We celebrated Cori's birthday too so it was a dual party. We had some yummy tacos and then let the kids trick-or-treat to a few of our old neighbors' houses. It's become a bit of a tradition that we accidentally started one year while showing off our costumes and cute kids. The picture at the end is us at my mom's neighbor's house--the Cox family. They are so cute--the kind of neighbors you hope for when buying a home. They actually serve hot dogs to all the trick-or-treaters...crazy cats! Anyway, so that was fun. Oh, the picture of the white phantom spirit is Alicia. She LOVES to dress up and find fancy and cute things to wear. Marcos is the opposite of Alicia on Halloween and I'm somewhere in the middle. I have only been able to get Marcos to put on what slightly resembled a costume (something army-ish) one year and that was because he was the only one not completely decked out in some fancy costume. I do not know what it is, but he hates it. He thinks it's a pointless holiday and although he's not the type to get embarrassed about basically anything, he can't bare the thought of being in a costume in front of people. I have to admit, my little scrouge has made it a little more difficult for me to want to dress up and get into the Halloween spirit myself. So we were lazy and didn't dress up. Oh well, at least we found costumes for the kids. It's a step in the right direction.