Halloween is one of our favorite holidays for us. There are several reasons for this. One is that we don't need to buy presents for everyone you've ever met, including that weird person in the office that you feel bad about not getting something for so you go to the dollar store and buy them some future Goodwill donation. Two is that you can dress up as anything you want. And three is having the kids do all of the work of gathering candy so you can eat it while they are sleeping. It's really just too much for them to eat by themselves, so you have to help them out a little bit.
Now that two out of three of the children are in school there are double the Halloween/Fall parties and double the character parades. All three kids wanted to be Paw Patrol again this year. Ryland was Tracker (an auxiliary character), Weston was Marshall, and Juliana is Skye of course since there is no other real character for her to be unless she is going to be Katie, the girl that pops up every so often on the show.
Weston had a character parade at his school where he dressed up as Marshall. All
of the kids in the preschool walk around the auditorium in a giant circle and wave (or stare blankly) at all of the parents. The parents are excitedly watching, waving, and smiling at their one child as they pass by, and then they look around the room the rest of the time in panic as they realize there are about 200 crazed sugar-hyped preschoolers in this room that seems to get smaller when there are that many yelling, jumping, and all too hyper children surrounding them.
Kara went all out this Halloween. She decorated their bathroom door with giant eyes the night before Halloween, which I think startled Ryland in the morning. She also
got Halloween plates and put up a little banner, as well as other various decorations around the house, including about 40 pumpkins. She also made little pies in the shapes of jack-o-lanterns for breakfast. There is no better way to start your Halloween than a sugar filled pie.
Later in the morning it was Ryland's character parade where the kids dress up as their favorite book characters. I think some kids missed the point, because there were some costumes that were from various TV shows or video games while the kids help out their favorite book, or at least the first book they picked up while running out of the house in the morning. Ryland was the mouse from If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. It is any easy costume to make and it also made it seem that we are the intelligent family who reads lots of books to our
kids instead of dressing our kid up as Mario or one of the characters from Fortnite. All the kids had to do was dress up as a book character, they weren't forced to actually read the book.
At night, we all went as an extended family of all of the grandparents, Kara's sisters, and other various people walking around the neighborhood with the kids. It's hard for the kids to walk around the neighborhood by themselves because their legs stop working at a certain point, so we dragged them around in their little three compartment wagon from house to house gathering candy. It can be a lot of work dragging them around, but it is fun to watch them go up to strangers, which we spend the rest of the year telling them to never do, and then get candy from them, another thing that we especially tell them never to do. It's the only day of the year where rules of proper dress and etiquette are completely thrown away and the abnormal becomes normal. If I were to dress up as an astronaut and knock on my neighbor's door and ask for candy any other day of the year I would be thrown in a mental hospital, but on Halloween, you would be crazy not to do this. Walking around the neighborhood at night dragging a wagon filled with wiggling children is not the most enjoyable thing to do, but let's face it, Halloween is just as enjoyable, if not more enjoyable for the parents because of the quality time talking to friends and neighbors and secretly eating the kids' candy.
Thus ends another year of Halloween. Now it's time to kick it to the curb along with the rest of Fall and get ready for Christmas, completely ignoring any other sort of holiday that may get in the way.
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