Halloween 2011

I absolutely LOVE halloween.

I love the "fall" weather, the costumes, the friends, the parties, the candy, the trick-or-treating door to door and most especially the normal meals that I can turn into a "Halloweenish" meal. My kids really love the candy of course along with all the parties we end up going to. While trick-or-treating they look at everyone elses costumes and try picking one that they want to be for the following year. What can I say, Our family really enjoys Halloween!

This year something happened and I can't quite put a finger on it cause' I'm thinkin' it was a lot of little things that all added up. Anyway, somehow I think our family became the "scrooge" of Halloween this year. It all started the beginning of October when we pulled out our 3 huge tote buckets full of our Halloween decorations. It's always hard the 1st year in a new house trying to figure out where to put everything but this time we really failed! Real quickly we realized we had almost NOWHERE to put anything. We don't have any shelves, our piano top that we've used in the past is in my bedroom so that was out, we also no longer have an enterainment center. All we had this year was 2 small black tables that I have sitting between our couches. The kids were quite disapointed with the lack of decor we used this year.

One of our traditions that we've had for many years is a Halloween Party at our house. The party just didn't happen this year. Of the 3 weekends we had we were out of town for 2 of them. Needless to say it just didn't work. Usually we end up going to a ward halloween party each year but apparently our current ward doesn't have a halloween party! Every year I love turning ordinary meals into something a little ghoulish. This year I didn't make a single one! I'm shocked at myself. What the heck??? I have been very busy these past few weeks with my school midterm and working 2x a week. The flu bug has also landed in our current town and has left many of us with diahria and throwing up. Just not fun around the holiday's.

So yesterday at school the kids were suppose to dress up for Halloween. This little guy must not have felt well cause he went to school REFUSING to wear a costume! He was the only one in his entire class not in costume. I'd be mortified being the single man out but it didn't seem to phase him. When he got home from school he asked if I'd take everyone down to Hurricane/St. George for trick-or-treating. Not wanting a 4 hour commute for a 2 hour trick-or-treating I refused to do it. So then he asked if I'd take him to Orderville (a near by town) I again said no, he then wanted me to take him to Glendale (a even nearer town) and of course I said no. He wanted to leave our little town because he thought there wasn't enough houses for trick-or-treating. I though we should stick around and give it a try. And so we did.

Hunter went as Darth Maul but refused to let me paint his face. He decided to change his costume to "the unknown phantom" instead!
Madelyn loved her costume! She was a new Winter Barbie in a box. A collectors item, right?


As I mentioned on an earilier blog I was hoping Emily would be something most little 5 year old girls would want to be. You know like a butterfly, a fairy, a princess but NO WAY. She insisted on being Alecia who is Diego's big sister. She wore her green pants with a vest and click around her neck. She insisted on leaving her hair down too cause that's how Alicia wears it. Over all her costume worked and she did look pretty cute in the end.

Brayden went as Diego! He refused to hold his bag for the picture.

Seriously, we should have done what Hunter had asked me to do. We should have left our little town and gone somewhere else. The kids and I started off walking up our street (Kory had to work being he's on the night shift). We were able to hit all 4 houses on our street. We turned the corner and came back down hitting 5 more houses. During the hour it took us to walk around our rather large block we didn't see a single person doing there trick-or-treating and the majority of the houses we got to, no one was home. There was a bowl of candy left on the porch to pick from. Frankly it was kinda boring and lonely! I couldn't believe we hadn't seen a single person out trick-or-treating at 7:00 at night. When we got close to our house a sister-in-law was driving by. Apparently the way people go trick-or-treating in our new little town is to have mom or dad drive the kids door to door.

SERIOUSLY???

Being the wind was starting to pick up and the temerature was starting to drop I loaded the kids in the van and finished our trick-or-treating for the night by me driving them. I am so glad I did too. There were only 6 other houses that had there porch lights on that we were able to stop at. Hunter was just beside himself thinking he only got to go to 15 houses!

Sorry kiddo!

The kids, and me too, were quite disapointed at the lack of people on the streets. The lack of community gathering that his holiday can bring. I loved talking to other parents as we watched our kids tentatively walk up to a spoooky house. Even though I really never liked the "trunk-or-treating" we had in AZ that our ward ALWAYS participated in, that would have been better than what we had this year. I'm thinking next year we'll head on down to Grandma's house to have ourselves a halloweenish good time. The kids can just skip school the next day!