Owen was so excited about trick-or-treating that he started asking about 3:30. 🙂 I told him it would be after dinner, so that put him off until about 4 before he started asking if it was dinnertime yet. Since the kids have a somewhat early bedtime, I figured we’d start on the early end (“official” time was listed as 5-9). So I got dinner going at 4:30 and we started getting dressed at about 5.
Of course there were wardrobe malfunctions—unfortunately, the wonderful idea I had about permanently adhering the red criss-cross leg straps to the costume wasn’t so great in practice. It helped, but we should have done a trial run because the ties still hung weird and slid down because the legs were too long. I fixed some of it by hiking it up and holding it with the belt…and it still wasn’t really great but it was good enough for a four year old. 🙂 But, I was exasperated because I thought it would be a quick two minutes to get his costume on…and it turned into a 15-minute debacle that included me running upstairs to madly search for my fabric tape with Katie screeching the whole time because she was tired of being in her high chair. And I was sweating, which never makes me happy.
So then I needed to get pictures of him so I left Katie screeching in the high chair while we went outside.
“Give me a ninja pose!”
Then I had to go get Katie ready. I hadn’t done it earlier since it was WARM out and her chicken costume would also be warm. Luckily she sat pretty still for a few pictures.
Then we were off.
Owen: I can’t believe I’m going trick-or-treating! It’s my big day!
And of course, the excitement quickly turned into shyness as we hit the first house. He didn’t want to go up the driveway (I had to cajole him and go up with him), he didn’t want to say trick or treat, and he didn’t say thank you. After three houses of that, I told him if he didn’t start being brave, we were going home. So the next house he tromped off saying “I’m going to be brave!” 🙂 Then it was all good!
This is how Katie was traveling in style:
The only bad thing was (as I learned later) we were out too early. Yes, the official hours were 5-9 but there were so few houses participating I almost wondered if Halloween had been cancelled and I just didn’t know it. I was remembering last year when the streets were packed with raucous kids and I thought we were out at about the same time…but I was off by about half an hour because things started picking up around 6 and were quite busy when we were headed home at 6:30.
Katie was a big hit—almost everyone commented on her costume and she was happily saying “bye bye” to everyone and waving.
We made it home about 6:35 and went right upstairs. I didn’t want to have any lights on downstairs lest anyone think we were home and ring the doorbell (we didn’t have a pumpkin or any lights on, but that didn’t stop people last year). I let Owen and Katie share a bag of mini cheese balls and a mini Nestle crunch bar, which they both really enjoyed!
Then it was Katie’s bedtime—and she didn’t even squawk and was out in under 10 minutes. Yay!
I let Owen ramble on about how much fun he had while eating a few more treats, and he got to bed a mere 10 minutes late.
So overall, it was a good day. 🙂