Halloween Antics

Man, what a busy busy day. Quinn had his first presentation at school today. It's a basically a report that the kids write and up give in front of all the other kids and parents are allowed to attend. I plan on covering his report all on it's own soon, but I figure since today is Halloween that should be focus of the post for tonight.


It started with Ginger asking me to come home early because the kids wanted to carve a pumpkin. Oh, and by the way, could I stop and buy a pumpkin on the way home. No problem I thought. Turns out getting a pumpkin on Halloween in a year where drought has caused a shortage of pumpkins is more difficult that you would expect. Wegman's had run out of pumpkins the day before. So I ended up stopping by a garden center on the way home and picked through the remains of what we shall refer to as the picked over pumpkins. These were bottom of the barrel pumpkins. Almost all of them were completely missing stems, and they had lots of dotty blemishes on them. But beggars can't be choosers, so I bought two and headed home.






Once home the kids didn't want to carve them so much as they wanted to draw on them what they wanted carved. Then guess who got to do the actual carving. Yep, good times. The difference between the kids pumpkin drawings was rather drastic. Catherine's had this absolutely huge mouth, but no eyes except little dots. I ended up having to use a drill to do the dots. Later Catherine added "ears" that looked and were positioned a lot like the eyes would have been. Quinn's pumpkin was simple and minimalistic. Very small eyes, nose and mouth and that was it.


Once finished I thought they turned out okay. The one above is Quinn's. Catherine's is the first picture in the post. Once she added those "ears" that look like eyes, I thought her pumpkin looked really good. Which just goes to show pumpkins need a big mouth (I would make a good pumpkin evidently).




The plan was the kids would stay in tonight and hand out candy. But as seven o'clock was approaching and not a single trick or treater had shown up, we started the think the whole night was going to be a complete bust. So after talking it over with Ginger, we decided the kids could get into their costumes and go the houses around the cul de sac. I think the reason we weren't getting any traffic is that we're off the main road, so I was hoping that by having the kids out walking around people on the main road would see us and realize there was loot to be had in our area. After hitting three houses I was thinking my plan wasn't going to work, but on the fourth house a group at the street saw us and started down our street. So lickity split we headed back home and the kids distributed candy for the next hour and some, which put them going to bed about an hour later than normal, but I figure it's Halloween and it only happens once a year.


The kids were extremely excited about the fact that they had gotten some candy from the neighbors and I'm pretty sure Catherine would have eaten everything she got had we let her (the little girl does love her candy). But as excited as they were about getting candy, I think they liked giving it out even more. And I'll bet kids love coming to our house, Quinn is very liberal in handing out candy (everyone would get five or more pieces it seemed). And we had two types of candy. Candy with peanuts (or that was made in plants that produced other things with peanuts) and peanut free candy. Quinn was giving out the "tainted" peanut candy while Catherine was giving out the peanut free candy. Catherine would always ask if anyone had peanut allergies, and we had three people throughout the night that said they did which I found interesting. At the same time a lot of the parents thought asking was a really good thing given how many people these days seem to have some type of food allergy.

Once we got the kids in bed, right after every knock on the door Quinn would yell for me and start quizzing me about how many kids were at the door when I answered it and what were they dressed as. I'm fairly certain he was forcing himself to stay awake so he wouldn't miss out on anything. The traffic ended just before nine, but I was amazed at how late it had started. I thought it normally started earlier. Maybe it was off because Daylight Savings Time hadn't switched yet and it didn't get darker until later than previous years. Anyway, no one really showed up at our house until almost seven thirty, but then we had a lot of traffic for the next hour or so.