Halloween Highlights

As you might have guessed, we did our first kid-Halloween this past Wednesday. Since our house gets about six groups a year -- and all of those are teenagers without costume -- we drove over to our friends' neighborhood.

It turns out that they live a block away from an area that takes the holiday VERY seriously. There were people pulling hay wagons full of kids with four-wheelers, lights and moving decorations all over, and enough sugared-up little people to make you look for the beginning of the yellow-brick road.

Vanya enjoyed the crowd and all, but it took him a little while to get the drift of what was happening. At first, he thought he was just supposed to follow the bigger kids up the walk, and then when they would turn to go back toward the road, he would do the same, missing out on his chance for candy.

After a few houses, he got the idea that whatever the people were dropping in his sack was something to be coveted. I'm not sure he ever figured out that it was candy. Always a nice kid, there were a couple of times where he set his bag down, reached in, and pulled out an exchange offer for the grown-up in front of him.

We got to a section that was less crowded, and the people really took the time to talk to him and pay attention. After that, he very much wanted to barge into everyone's house, just to converse. The fact that his only conversation starter is "bye-bye" was not a detriment.

I bet we went to 15-20 houses, with long stays for socializing at several of them. We were out late enough that we heard a voice down the street telling a different group, "HALLOWEEN'S OVER! GO HOME!" Not long after that, we walked back to the mother ship and let the over-hyper kids amuse themselves while we relaxed with a drink. We got home late and very tired.

I had thought that the candy haul was good. But on Thursday, the dogs got in the bag, and when I got to it, there was nothing but nubbin old junk candy. I didn't know dogs could distinguish good candy from junk, but either they can, they got really lucky, or he didn't get as good a haul as I originally thought. No way to know which of those is the actual case.

I'm working on a month and a half's worth of pictures that will go up in three different collections. Halloween pics are part of all of that. They should all be up this week.