And then there was the 31st...

Halloween evening we were invited with many other families over to our friends' house for a big party. They fed us a great big dinner and tons of desserts with the UT game on in the background. What could be better? After eating all of the kids hit the streets for good old fashioned trick-or-treating. It had been sprinkling on and off all day, so we were lucky that while we were going door to door the precipitation was limited to a light misting. The kids hardly noticed, so excited they were. Lydia only even asked me to carry her treat-bucket twice. Once all of the kids made it back to the house, they were divided in to age groups to go through the haunted woods behind the back yard. I took Josh and Lydia with the under-7 group and it was great. All of the dads at the party had donned masks and glowing-eye goggles and such, and were hiding along side the path that we walked on through the woods. They did a good job of not being too scary for little kids but still being fun. It was a super-great party, I hope they do it again next year.

Now: the evening's attire. Even though all of the kids love Harry Potter and enjoyed their trunk-or-treat costumes, none of them had any interest in wearing them again when it was the big night. Not a problem, I assured them, you can be whatever you want that we can put together with what we have in the house.

It was really interesting to see what they came up with. Given the restrictions I had given them and the fact that we didn't start assembling things until Saturday afternoon I had my doubts about how these costumes would turn out. I ended up being very pleasantly surprised though.

Ben and Josh each changed their minds several times in the days leading up to Halloween. Mummy, werewolf, Darth Mahl (spelling?), ghost, Jedi, vampire, Darth Vader, and so forth...round and round their indecision went. Finally, on Saturday morning they knew what they wanted to be.

[Regular white church shirt and dark pants, red ribbon around neck, dark red paint-blood, plastic fangs and look, it's Scott's Prof. Snape wizard robe cut off to be a Ben-sized vampire cape! Perfect!]

[Painted on nose and whiskers, and dark brown fleece wolfy features (fuzzy chest, eyebrows and sideburns, knee showing through hole in jeans, and fuzzy hands...faux-fur would have looked much better, but we didn't have any. But brown fleece; yes. The same fleece used for Ben's scarecrow hat last year.), and a brown sock tail in the back. He's howling, by the way...he's a werewolf by the way.]
Now Emma on the other hand decided on her costume literally the day after Halloween last year. I don't know where the idea came from or why it stuck, but for whatever reason she did not waver once on her choice to be...a bat. [Black tights and legging under a black skirt and long-sleeved black shirt. We made her wings with scraps from making the original Snape-robe. It was Emma's own clever idea to hot glue some pieces of yarn on them to look a little more wingy. She also asked if I could add some pink felt scraps to Lydia's Dobby-ears. Voila.]

Lydia was less creative. All week she talked about being Tinkerbell (which she did in fact dress as for her preschool Halloween party), then at the last minute threw on a pink-barbie-fairy type dress-up thing and called it good. Sorry, I didn't even take her picture in it. Afton we dressed in the same ducky costume that baby-Cruzes have been wearing for the past nine years.

Here's our four trick-or-treaters with one of their friends. I edited out everyone's red-eyes in the photo, but now I realize that with the exception of Lydia, everyone's look might have actually been enhanced by leaving them in.