Happy Halloween!

We purposefully came home from our Avon trip on Saturday (rather than Sunday) so we could take our Scooby-Doo-gang-clad family to Englewood's Halloween carnival.

They have games you can play (you pay tickets and win candy), storytimes, obstacle courses, and places to play.  We went last year for the first time, and decided it would be fun to do again

Robin liked this game in particular, because it involved throwing things into a toilet

Then it was on to the Little Kid play area

Balls!  (Almost nothing can excite Liam more than a ball/balls)

Hee hee hee!  This is SOOOO worth staying up past my bedtime for!

Decorating pumpkins took a backseat to birthday-party-and-vacation planning this year, so we only got them decorated the day before Halloween--even though we got them at the pumpkin patch in early October

This is the first year that Liam got to help, too

This is Liam's "the-camera-is-pointed-at-me,-say-'cheese'" smile, by the way

I love the one with the big eyes

I had wanted to have a Pumpkin Decorating party with some of Robin's friends, but I came down with strep and didn't want to get anybody else sick.  Oh well, we still had fun

And here they are!  (I did the big one myself, after everybody was in bed)

These are Liam's (I did the eyes)

And these are Robin's

The pumpkins out on the front step, greeting trick-or-treaters on Halloween night

Our entry

It's the Scooby Gang!  Dean is Shaggy, Eileen is Daphne, Robin is Fred, and Liam is Scooby Doo!

And a close-up

For comparison, here's the shot from when Robin was Scooby, three years previously

Trick or Treat!!!

Some friends of ours were going to have a group of kids trick-or-treating together and we'd been planning to join them, but then Dean and the boys got diagnosed with strep on Halloween itself.  Yeah, a household of strep wasn't fun.  But we all got medicated and got better.  We decided to keep our infectious disease to ourselves, and just trick-or-treated in our neighborhood again.  Our neighborhood is funny.  Probably less than half of the houses are open for business, but everybody gives out handfuls of candy.  After two blocks in our neighborhood, the boys buckets overflow.

Liam chewed all the way through the wrapper on this sucker by the time we got home.  I remember Robin doing the same thing when trick-or-treating when he was 1

The boys made out like bandits.  In fact, they got so much, and it takes us so long to get through it all, that we "sold" a good chunk of it to a dentist office this year.  It felt good to reduce the amount, Robin has been starting to appreciate money so he saw the value in it, and the 'sold' candy gets sent to our troops.  Win-win-win!

The obligatory "sitting in the cauldron" photo

It was fun to get everybody dressed up with the same theme again.  I don't know how many years of that we've got left, so we're enjoying them while they last.  Happy (very much belated) Halloween!