Trick or treat?

If you are on facebook, you may have already seen these pictures. Since Brian has joined the facebook mania, he has pretty much taken over posting our family pics. there. So sorry for the repeats. However what you do get here is my biased, in-depth stories behind the shutter action. If a picture is worth a thousand words, you can have 5030 words through the Brian's facebook or 5200 words here through this here blog ;) Not that we're trying to one up each other. I really didn't enjoy the time it took to upload to facebook, but Brian doesn't mind it AND I really enjoy telling you all the intriguing (to some) details of the kid's lives, so we make a good team I guess.


Ivan was so totally excited about Halloween, he was buzzing with energy all week long. Friday morning he woke up and the first words out of his mouth were: "Is it Halloween?" I had tried the kid's costumes on them the night before and that afternoon we carved the pumpkins (I wait until the last minute since I cook up our pumpkins and we eat them). We barely had any kids come this year- I guess in part because it was Friday, but also, very few of our neighbors around us give out candy, so the kids have to come a long way, just for our house and I think they may just skip our end of the street for greener pastures. That's what the kids and I did. Normally I just take them down our street and meet/greet our neighbors, but I thought that'd be a downer with only a half dozen houses participating, so we made a loop and included the street behind us. It had more, 1/3 to 1/2 their neighbors were lit up. But what is it with adults wanting to scare kids now-a-days? I thought trick or treat used to mean "give us a treat or we'll do a trick on you" (which is not so cool really), but there were several scary houses with dressed up adults wanting to jump out at kids.


At every house the kids asked me two questions: "Are they good guys here?" "Are they dressed up?" We did have a good discussion about people looking different and that it's not how we look on the outside, but how we act that counts. They saw that "ugly" looking people were generous, kind and giving too. Despite the lack of participating houses, the kids got a ton of candy. Before we had even gotten to our first house, we ran into a band of kids we knew and they started to pull handfulls of loot from their bags so that Ivan and Dominique had something. Then the houses were often very generous. I think everyone had a low turnout, so they were giving it out by the handfulls. It's funny to think that we had all sorts of candy bought and then they came home with a bunch too. It's like we all just shared.


The next day, I felt like Mrs Pioneer herself, eating toasty pumpkin seeds (I used the microwave and highly recommend it) and cooking up the pumpkins. I felt a little less pioneerish when I realized I was using running water, an electric stove, a microwave, food processor and freezer simultaneously for my winter food storing purposes. I felt downright exhausted by the time I had a dozen or so containers lined up filled with cooked, pureed pumpkin for the freezer and not so pioneer at all when I realized we had not actually grown our pumpkin and all my work would have not been much fodder for a family of 4 going on 5 to survive through a winter. Ah, well. That's why I live now, have a car and about 20 stores I can go to all year with food from all over the world ;) But we will also have yummy fresh pumpkin for waffles, pies, empanadas, soups, baby food, muffins... I get a maniacal satisfaction when I've gotten the kids to eat a vegetable at breakfast. Maybe it makes up for all the other days when I can't get them to put an ounce of green to their lips.

If you didn't figure out our costumes, Ivan was Franklin (a popular kid's character from videos and books- he's a turtle, but most people thought he was one of the ninja turtles). Dominique was "momma's little helper" (but some called her little miss muffet or holly hobby) and thanks to Jenn's friend Pella who posted pics on facebook pre-halloween, I was a pumpkin. I just thought she was too cute and this is the only halloween that my costume would have worked. With Ivan I delivered before halloween and with Dominique I didn't even know I was pregnant yet, much less showing enough to be a pumpkin. So thanks Pella!

Hope your halloween weekend was good. Did you do anything special?