November flew by, in the best way possible, I had a couple trips, spent time with family, and made a lot of progress on projects at work. It was a little jarring to discover that now, in mid-December, I hadn’t yet writtern about Halloween!
As I’ve written about before, Halloween is my favorite holiday. We decorate a bit, and do family costumes (while the kids are young enough to tolerate it, hah!). This year, our family costume theme was decided by an exchange between MJ and Aaron:
Aaron: Dada, I want to be Darth Vader.
MJ: Oh, for Halloween?
Aaron: No, I want to BE Darth Vader.
MJ: …
Well, we can’t fulfill all of Aaron’s bad guy fantasies (ahem), but we could at least let him dress up as Darth Vader for Halloween, and have the rest of us follow. Adam was Obi-Wan Kenobi, MJ was the Emperor, and I was Princess Leia.
Event-wise, the big one we did with the boys was at Adam’s elementary school, where they had various games and activities, along with a fire truck.
We also got them a pair of light sabers to go with their costumes, which they enjoyed walking around the neighborhood with before Halloween as we visited the local Halloween lights.
The day before Halloween we carved pumpkins, during which I just went with carving a single pumpkin with a very classic design. It had been a pretty busy autumn and I wasn’t feeling as creative as usual, and I had a feeling that the boys would lose interest once we got deep into pumpkin creation (they did). Thankfully, our au pair and former au pair were more creative than I.
The evening of Halloween was our biggest adventure yet! In previous years we’d only gone down our own street, but this year we added the street parallel to ours after noticing it was still early enough and the boys were bundles of energy.
Our au pair (dressed as Padme) and our former au pair (dressed as Rei) joined us for the trick-or-treating festivities.
Many thanks to the passerby who snapped our photo, I hope your kids took some extra candy!