Halloween was one of the busiest Saturday's we have had in a long time. But it was also lots of fun. In the morning, the kids cut out and baked some Halloween cookies. For lunch I tried to make spider web pizza. It was cute, but didn't look much like the picture in the recipe. Next year I will be more experienced and will hopefully have more luck. After lunch, we decorated the now cooled cookies for our friends and neighbors.
Aunt Liz had brought some fun Halloween sprinkles to use, and the kids had a great time decorating and eating their masterpieces.
Even Baby decorated a few all by herself!
Afterward, we headed down to Affoltern because they were having a little town carnival. It had been going on the previous weekend as well, but that was the same day as the Halloween Carnival at church, so we had to skip it. The kids were very excited to learn that it would be on for a second weekend, so they wouldn't have to miss it.
Chris and Nicholas weren't interested in attending, and I was worried about finding a place to park nearby, so Chris offered to drive us down and come back and pick us up when we were finished. There wasn't a whole lot on offer, but we still managed to spend a happy hour riding everything that was kid appropriate. The younger kids were on a little train and Amelia decided that she wanted to go on this really fast spinning ride. You know, cuz she's too big for that little baby ride. I walked over with her to help her buy the ticket, and the closer we got, the more unsure she became. We stood and watched the people whizzing by at a high rate of speed, listening to all the big teenagers screaming, for a while. Then she looked at me and said "Maybe I won't go on there." 🙂
Sarah and Alexandra decided to sit out the bumper cars, but Noah and I rode together, and Amelia and Sophie also shared a car. It was pretty wild, but lots of fun. Sophie said "I thought you were too old to ride bumper cars!" Hmm, gonna have to start doing more daring things with my children. Although I will admit to feeling slightly sick to my stomach as we climbed out after our double length ride.
We called Chris to come pick us up, and started walking home to meet up along the way. We were crossing the street, and Alexandra was holding Sophie's hand. All of a sudden, she stopped walking and refused to go further. So, Sophie pulled hard on her hand and finally got her to the safety of the sidewalk. That is when we all noticed the reason why she had stopped walking. Her shoe had fallen off and was lying in the middle of the street! We watched, laughing as several cars proceeded to drive over it, without touching it once. Finally, there was a break in the traffic, and I ran out and retrieved her shoe. Of course, this slowed down our progress towards home, and Chris ended up catching up with us while we were still in sight of the carnival. Oh well.
As soon as we got home, everyone ran to get their costumes on, while I bagged up the cookies we had decorated for our neighbors.
I filled the kids treat bags and we headed out for some traditional trick or treating fun, with a Charles twist. We would ring the doorbell and when they opened the door, we said "Happy Halloween!" and handed them the treats! Several people were quite confused at first, but we quickly explained that we just wanted to give them something as well. Then they would smile and go get some candy for the kids. Although there has been trick or treating in our town for several years now, we still managed to catch a couple people off guard. We knew this by the type of treats they put in the bags; an open, but still mostly full bag of gum balls, and a bag of walnuts! We tried to only go to people we knew, and a few houses where we knew those people also celebrated Halloween. A couple people had already run out of candy by the time we got there, even though we went at 5:30! I thought that was pretty early, but appa
rently, they only had enough treats for one group of kids. Silly, silly people.
We came home after about an hour and Chris got the kids bathed while I got dinner in the oven. It was our traditional Halloween fare of Halloweenies and blood, witch, bat and cat-shaped dark purple Jello jigglers, boiled witch knuckles, and as a new addition this year, mud slides to drink. The only thing missing was our traditional scary story. We couldn't find the paper it was written on. :( But there is always next year.