Halloween stuff

Ridgeland celebrated Halloween on Saturday, the 30th this year, so we had to hurry back from Grandma's birthday party in Natchez to make it in time to trick-or-treat. The weather turned cooler, so long sleeves and tights were necessary. My kids were already overloaded with candy from the Halloween carnival at the Mormon church on Wednesday night. Honestly that was Halloween for me. We dressed up (well, the kids, at least), hung out with friends, ate food and candy, played games, and went home. I'd have been happy to be done with Halloween by Wednesday night, but no, of course we had to go beg our neighbors for candy too. This year we went with the Williams family, which was a lot more fun for me, although we learned that kids as a mob just run helter-skelter from house to house without waiting for the little ones to keep up.

These are the costumes they picked:
Katherine: Kaya, the American Girl. Of course, nobody on the planet would've guessed this. Sacagawea and Pocohontas were the main guesses.
Elizabeth: Wonder Woman
Rachel: a cheetah
Caroline: Spiderman
Daniel: a little explanation is called for here. Daniel had decided he was too old to dress up, so he was just going to wear a mask or something to trick-or-treat, but then got inspired a day or two before Halloween. He decided to be Alex, the cardboard genius. No, you've never heard of this guy, but he's the hero of a very neat trilogy of books by Frank Asch. This kid is a science whiz and makes spaceships, time machines, ect. from ordinary household objects and saves his bratty little brother in the process. So Daniel popped out the lenses from an old pair of sunglasses and replaced one of them with a paper cutout covered in equations. He took a caulk gun and rigged it as a speciatly ray gun of some sort, the details of which I'm a little unclear about. Then he carried a notebook filled with equations. Since he left the glasses at home, to the untrained eye he appeared to simply be Daniel, a non-genius (my assessment, for the leaving of his glasses at home), but I was fairly proud of him for coming up with the idea and props entirely on his own. I didn't realize 'til later that I didn't get a single picture of him with his props. Grrr.
More Halloween pictures on facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=101663&id=1268580531&l=618dfffccc

The only sad note about Halloween came in the form of the Great Pumpkin. A friend suggested what works for them - the kids get to gorge themselves on candy the day after Halloween, then that night they leave the rest of the candy on the fireplace and the Great Pumpkin comes and trades the candy for a gift. That sounded awesome, but due to a failure to procure gifts, the Great Pumpkin didn't show up. The Grim Pumpkin showed up instead and just stole the rest of their candy. Drat! We hate that Grim Pumpkin! Too bad. At least he left me the good chocolate stuff.