halloween

Have you ever heard the saying "Want to make God laugh, tell him your plans."? Well, the same can be said in reference to children. Well, at least my stubborn, opinionated children! *Not that either of those characteristics are a bad thing!* They had their own ideas for halloween this year. And their grand plan did not include the pumpkin and clown costumes that I had wanted them to wear! They wanted to be princesses.....and wear the same dresses they wore to the carnival a few days before. Which was fine. Really! I'd have preferred a pumpkin and a clown (I dressed up as a clown when I was 3 too!) but a princess is fine....at least they wanted to dress up! The biggest excitement for me was that Maddie actually let me put pigtails in her hair WITH BOWS!! Granted, I put my hair in pigtails with bows first and there was a lot of negotiating, but she eventually let me, and she kept them in ALL night!! Woo hoo.

Our neighborhood has a lot of churches which equals a lot of halloween carnivals, but this year I wanted to take the girls trick or treating which our neighborhood is not so good for. We have a lot of golden oldies that live here and they don't seem too big on passing out candy. So I piled the girls in the car and headed to our friend's neighborhood which had a TON of kids! There was a lot of anticipation leading up to treating and it's funny because my kids had no idea what this was all about since we have never done it with them before, but they knew it was going to be something fun that involved candy, and that was enough to make them jittery with excitement! We loaded them up into wagons and headed out. Maddie did exceptionally well except for the couple times she tried to go into other people's houses.....it makes sense though, they opened their doors.....normally when people do that you go inside right?!? Charlotte on the other hand did not do so well. She was tired, she is teething, and it was hard to go up the driveway, up the stairs to the front porch, down the stairs, down the driveway, into the wagon and on to the next house. She also didn't really understand what was going on. I helped her the whole way, but it was still tough. Did I mention that it was also 80 degrees and REALLY humid? Yep, the weather never fails to get gross for halloween. The day after halloween the high was 62. Nice. Around 8:00 we had enough of the treating and headed home. The girls were exhausted, overly cranky and flying on a sugar high. They fell asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillow.

All in all a good halloween. Probably would have been easier to leave Charlotte at home, but it wouldn't have felt right. She's part of our gang and we would have missed her. I think we had more than enough halloween fun and I'm glad it's over until next year. Maddie has asked me repeatedly "Can we go treating tomorrow?" I think she liked it! Now if I could only figure out how to get rid of all this candy without anyone in my family consuming it, or freaking out over it being gone!