Halloween! Halloween! Halloween!

IT'S HALLOWEEN!
I'm very excited. I love Halloween. My kids love Halloween. They were bouncing off the walls this morning which wasn't actually very cool because they took it too far, but the being excited part is great. My 3 year old woke me up by asking me "daddy, guess what day it is?" He was very excited.
What's so great about Halloween? Candy, of course, but also running around in the dark, dressing up, getting to stay up later than makes sense on a school night, getting to have a piece of candy for desert every night for the next week! It's all awesome. The buildup to Halloween is awesome too. We start talking seriously about costumes at the beginning of September. They go back and forth and think of ideas and steal their siblings ideas and fight about it and get ideas from books and TV and each other. By the first weekend in October final decisions are made and we shop for materials. Cutting out and sewing takes place in the evenings and on the weekends. One by one the costumes get fitted and finished. If you are in preschool yours gets done early for the costume parade at school. If you're older or younger they yours might still be getting worked on the night before. Finally they're all done. Everyone transforms into what they wanted to be. My children still think the costumes are even more awesome than they imagined them. They're so sweet.
This year we had a Victorian era vampire, two bats and Batman. There was sort of a theme going on.

This is what cars saw, I'm such a bad father.

The downside of the theme is that everyone was wearing black. Largely all black. For trick-or-treating at night. Good thinking there dad. Make all of your kids invisible to passing cars. After I saw everyone dressed up it occured to me that I really should have dressed up as a light house or an air traffic controller with those light up cone thingies or just a big flashing road sign that said PLEASE DON'T RUN OVER MY KIDS! I'm quite sure that I broke several rules of Halloween dressing with the all black, but the kids did look great and they had a great time. This was the first year we were able to just trick-or-treat without being slowed down by someone with very short legs who just didn't understand what we were doing. Everyone understood, everyone hustled to the next house, everyone mostly stayed out of the road and we all made it back home safely. Later in the week I'll explain what a family that doesn't really eat sweets does with 15 lbs of candy.