light up the night

Last night was our second annual "Light up the Night." It was fun, not as much fun as last year because we didn't have as many kids this year, but it was still fun. What's the deal? We were ready this year for tons of kids and we just didn't have that many, it was very disappointing. We kept waiting for the masses to arrive, but they never showed up. In previous years they would seem to bus them into our neighborhood, but they must have moved on to better neighborhoods. We had more lights in our yard this year, more games for the kids to play, more candy to give them, more glo-necklaces to find in the leaf pile, more everything, just not more kids. One reason the masses of kids went elsewhere could be that no one seems to receive trick-or-treaters anymore, the next house handing out candy was 4 or 5 houses down in every direction. There were also a lot of churches doing "trunk-or-treat" in town which must be the newest way to do Halloween instead of old fashion trick-or-treating. Wait, why am I complaining, I now have tons of good candy left over! We did take Lance to a few houses in the neighborhood and after the first house he realized that trick-or-treating was a lot of fun. He would practically run up to the door (even if there were dogs) and hold out his bag. I couldn't believe how quickly he caught on to the whole, knock on door, get candy, move onto the next house routine of trick-or-treating and how he didn't complain with having to walk around when he was quite tired. This year, we went cheap with the costumes and all four of us got dressed up with what we already had around the house, no store bought costumes this year. I was Princess Leia (with bagels in my hair so I could get her side buns), Lance was a Jawa (sand person from Star Wars), but later we decided Obi-Wan was better, Jeff was Luke Skywalker with Yoda a.k.a. Lily on his back (I put her in all green and then taped ears to one of her hats, it was a stretch, but when she was on Jeff's back in the carrier it worked). I had a good time getting creative with our costumes and figuring out what we could use from around the house, bagels, belts, paper, etc. I will post pictures after I get them from Jeff's camera. So despite having few trick-or-treaters, we had a good time and we were able to have lots of games for the kids who came by our house to play hopefully making their night a lot of fun.