This year's Halloween can be summed up in a single word: overload. We started with trick-or-treat at my office on Friday afternoon, followed immediately by two community Halloween events/parties for the kids. For this occasion, we had a pirate and a cowboy.

As mentioned in the previous post, the next two nights included trick-or-treat events in Wisconsin. We took Monday off, but were back at it Tuesday with pumpkin carving with Grandma and Grandpa. It had been many years since they last participated in this form of artistry, which was good, because it meant they'd forgotten (suppressed the memory of?) how messy and disgusting it is. But I was SO glad for their help. My kitchen was a big mess, but without their support we might have had to cordon it off as a biohazard. They were also good at watching for little eager-to-help fingers getting to close to my carving knife.

We ended up with two relatively respectable attempts to carve the images they saw in their creative minds. I was not up to the challenge of eyebrows, mustaches and beards, but they were satisfied to sketch these in with a Sharpie.

Note that Edward's has glasses

Later that night, John finally returned, fell into an exhausted but grateful-to-be-in-his-own-bed sleep and was thus able to power through the entire next day at work followed by an hour and 20 minutes of neighborhood trick-or-treating. 

A vampire and a ninja

It was the longest we've ever been out and the farthest from home we've ever ventured on this night. We went with some friends who live on the next block down the hill. Our customary routes really only intersected on our block, so we ended up covering the majority of both our individual routes, which resulted in a mammoth candy intake.

A lesson in sorting and early graphing

And all of this was preceded by costume parades at both boys' schools (Daniel's at 1:30; Edward's at 2. Not as tight a schedule as it may seem given that Daniel's parade lasted about 15 seconds.)

Check out the policeman behind  Snow White

 Edward's costume was perfect for school as he was able to wear it all day and just add the hat and glasses when it was time for the parade. He was very happy to stay out of the chaos that was the bathroom changing area (even if he was a little disappointed that not everyone knew who he was. Do you?)

Waldo!

 After school, the PTO put on a Halloween party/dance for the kids. I was lucky to be assigned to the clean-up brigade, so Daniel and I stayed away until the last 15 minutes or so.

So, to sum up, we went trick-or-treating four times. The kids each wore four different costumes over the course of the extended celebration (Daniel: pirate, ninja, knight, policeman; Edward: cowboy, ninja, Waldo, vampire.) But they put together all of their own costumes from pieces in our dress-up collection. The only thing I had to buy was the Waldo hat and that involved a five-minute Amazon.com search and two clicks to purchase--pretty much exactly the energy I wish to expend on this particular celebration.