Happy Halloween!

For the first round of Halloween festivities, we went to the Syracuse City Pumpkin Walk on Saturday, October 24th with our good friends the Christiensens. Their son Connor and Dylan were in the same class in kindergarten and we've enjoyed getting to know their family. Each year the city of Syracuse lines the walkway around one of their parks with pumpkins and it's fun to go for a night walk and see the hundreds of carved pumpkins on display. The pictures turned out lousy, but the kids had a great time.

The the Halloween fairy stopped by our house - twice. Our family has a secret Santa who is doing the twelve weeks of Christmas for us. This week Santa dropped off a Halloween candy dish that the kids have raided or attempted to raid every day this week. On Friday, a special package from Grandma Litchfield arrived with three giant sugar cookie pumpkins for the kids which were inhaled faster than I'd like to admit. (Photos of the floor and counter post-cookie will not be included in this post.) Thank you Santa and Grandma!

And then to Saturday! Ben and I decided to take the kids to Walmart for trick-or-treating before dinner time. As usual, it was a huge production getting everyone ready and out the door. Sean cut Ash's glitter shoes with scissors so I had to quickly drag out the sewing machine and glue gun, SaMy's crown needed some work and Sean had a wardrobe malfunction when he tried taking off his firefighter coat without undoing the clasps.

We eventually made it the store and the kids had a good time going from department to department getting candy. The hightlight was Kade announcing to everyone he saw that, "Hi. I'm Kaden. I have a tail." I deliberatly chose not to take pictures in the store since this would make the second major holiday immortalized in the isles of Walmart which I just. can't. do. (Although ... be looking forward to this year's Christmas picture. We saw some beautiful trees and inflatables going up in the Lawn & Garden area.)

Finally it was time for pictures and dinner before the older kids went out with Dad. (Bigger pictures are on the kids' blogs.) Only Cam and Dylan ended up going after SaMy and Kade decided not to eat dinner. My kids are so weird -- who doesn't like tacos?

Dylan as Bumblebee, Cameron the Robot

Kaden as Scooby Doo, Creepy the Firefighter

SaMy as Glenda the Good Witch, Ash as Dorothy

As usual, it was only a few minutes into pictures before Creepy started stripping out of his costume on his way down to just a diaper. We've got plenty of messes, sticky costumes and laundry waiting for Monday, but all in all, it was a great Halloween.