Frayed

Phew. I am glad Halloween is done. With all of the different activities, playgroups and parties, the Tumbleweed wore her costume 7 times and the Dandelion wore his 6 times. I was starting to wonder if they would last. I look an "official" photo after the school PumpkinFest (event #2) just in case!


Tinkerbell and Captain Hook after PumpkinFest (Oct. 25th)

The costumes survived through playgroups and school and two more Halloween parties, and made it to the big day. By mid-afternoon on Halloween everyone was exhausted, so everyone except me took naps. I used the time to finally put up a few decorations and prepare for pumpkin decorating (that's right, we still hadn't decorated our pumpkins).


The Tumbleweed with our two "PumpkinHeads"

As darkness approached we put an extra layer under the costumes and practiced ringing the doorbell. The Tumbleweed even pretended to hand out candy so the Dandelion would understand better. Instead he got mad that she didn't have any candy. Oh well.


The Trick-or-Treaters headed out into the neighborhood

This year they made it a lot further than they have in the past. After about 45 minutes they came back past the house for "halftime" (empty candy bags and have some dinner). After that the Dandelion only went back out to go to the neighbor's house, before joining me at home to hand out candy (not a tough job - we only had 10 kids come in 3 groups.)


The haul

Upon their return I realized that since we live on a street that isn't really a hot-spot of Trick-or-Treating all of the neighbors seem to give out giant handfuls. I think this results in way more candy than going to more houses in a cul-de-sac neighborhood where there are lots of kids.

This year, since the Tumbleweed is working on sorting & tallying, I had her sort her candy and make a bar graph of the different types & colors. Once she had all of the candy sorted, and counted, she used it to "purchase" some toys from my Halloween store. For the third year, each kid got a few Halloween-themed toys I had bought on clearance last year in exchange for most of their candy. So far the kids have not given me a hard time about giving away their candy, especially when I remind them that the toys will last a long time and candy does not.


Good-bye candy, hello toys!