Halloween

     It seems really odd to me that I have a child who's most absolute favorite day of the whole year is Halloween.  I never really thought Halloween was that exciting.  I liked dressing up, but then my costumes always started to "bother" me, and trick-or-treating was cold and dark.  But GD has been looking forward to Halloween since April and is already talking about next Halloween (and pretending that everyday since October 31 was Halloween again).  His excitement for the holiday is solely based on his loves of the Curious George Halloween BOOFest Special and stabbing pumpkins with a carving tool.  He was beyond excited to be dressing up as No Noggin, even though we only came across two people that had even heard of No Noggin.  His costume was pretty simple to put together (especially because Curious George shows you how to make it in the show), and he helped with all of it.

      Of course, GE gets excited about anything his brother is excited about, so he was overjoyed to be dressing up too.  Even though I had a cute cowboy costume and a banana costume leftover from GD that would have fit GE, I wanted to make him his own.  GE is pretty obsessed with cows right now, and farm animals in general, so I made him a comfy cow costume that I'm sure he will wear again and again.  He was especially enamored with his tail.

     The weather the night of trick-or-treating was perfect, about 70 degrees, and since the time change is different than it was 20+ years ago when I last went trick-or-treating, it wasn't even dark.  We went into town to a friendly neighborhood where people sat on the front porch waiting for trick-or-treaters or just sat a bowl of candy out for kids to take from;  I didn't even have to have my kids knock on strangers' doors which I really appreciated.  They really had a lot of fun.

     Trick-or-treating was two days before Halloween and GD was still highly anticipating the actual holiday.  I was concerned he would be disappointed that there wouldn't be an avalanche of pumpkins, a Haunted House of Very Scary Fish, or - for the nervous types - a Regular House of Perfectly Normal Fish (really, if you haven't seen the Curious George Halloween BOOFest special, take 54 minutes and watch it on Netflix).  I couldn't really even think of anything Halloween-y, but the day did end up being what GD declared was "the best Halloween ever!"

    They had a friend come in the morning to see their goats and chickens, so of course they had fun showing off their farm animals.  Then we painted pumpkins and did a Halloween craft.

    That afternoon GD asked when we were going to rake leaves (we would have to rake them because we don't have the Hertzburg Leaf Suck-a-Pator 2000).  We don't have any leaves, and G was going to be really late from work, so I decided to take the boys up to our church to rake some leaves.

     They had the time of their lives raking leaves.  Really, it was probably more fun than Christmas morning will ever be for them.  GD's Halloween was complete.

    They had so much fun raking leaves that we had to go back the next day and do it again.