The Salvateenies: Halloween 2014

It was a SUPERHERO Halloween around here. The kids wanted to decorate the house, but I didn't get around to getting any decorations. I did get them tiny pumpkins to color, though, and they seemed pleased enough with those.

Caroline's pumpkin face

Daniel's pumpkin face

Max hard at work

We put them out on the stoop so that Halloween-night trick-or-treaters would know our house was candy-friendly.

But first, it was International Day at school. For whatever reason, the school chooses not to celebrate Halloween, but instead to mark October 31 as "International Day", asking parents to dress their kids in something that represents their cultural heritage and to bring a snack to share that comes from that culture. This presents a few challenges for me. First, I'm already dealing with having to come up with three Halloween costumes and Halloween snacks, now I have to do another whole batch? Also, the kids are almost the very definition of "American" - no more than 1/4 of any specific heritage, all smushed together.

Last year, it was sort of a last minute decision and I put them in "The City" tshirts and brought Boudin sourdough bread. A girlfriend of mine laughed when I told her that story, asking, "Seriously? To represent your kids' cultural heritage, you sent WHITE BREAD?" So I thought this year I'd dress them in the tshirts that Boppy brought them from Ireland and make soda bread, just to keep with the white bread theme. I mean, they're only 1/16 Irish, but they all have "Kelly" in their names, right?

And then, on the Wednesday before Halloween, the Giants won their third World Series since the kids have been around and the decision was obvious. I put them in their World Series tshirts and made garlic fries!

Showing off their duds before school

Finishing up the parade

After the morning's "show" at school, Daddy took them to visit Grandma and Papa and have dinner in Livermore before coming back for Trick or Treating in their SuperHero duds.

We departed our Fortress of Teenietude at about 6 and wandered our block and the ones around us for about an hour, seeking out the houses that were decorated and waiting for trick or treaters. WE aren't a high-traffic area, so we were rewarded with handsful of candy at a couple of the less-visited houses and by the time our corner was in sight, the kids were complaining that their candy buckets were getting too heavy to carry. Success!

Bat-Max

Super-Daniel

Wonder-Caroline

My attempt at putting a Superman curl in Daniel's hair

The first house

Mouth-full of candy

Testing out the lollipops

Daniel is sneaking a peak into Max's bucket to see what goodies there are

My favorite part of the night, though, came at about 8pm. We'd been home for nearly an hour and hadn't had a trick or treater in about that long when the doorbell rang. The kids sprang into action, opening the door to offer candy. Max started things off with a "Happy Halloween - here's some candy for you!" Caroline peered outside and saw they had a pet with them, adding, "Oooh - you have a doggie a costume!" And Daniel finished it off, standing on his tippy toes to see over his siblings and say, "Wow! You are a skeleton for Halloween? Awesome!"

And with that, another successful Halloween night was in the books. But the celebration wasn't QUITE over. Saturday came and it was time for MOSE'S PARTY! The kids weren't sure if anyone else would be in costume, so they wore their superhero tshirts and brought their costumes to change into. Which they did immediately upon seeing that Mose's Dad was dressed up as Superman! (complete with glasses, which they pointed out was "just like Clark Kent").

There were about 8 kids at the party, most from the kids' school, and they spent an hour or so running around inside and playing with every single one of Mose's toys. Then they made English muffin pizzas to eat and it was time to go in the back yard for games! First up was "find the eyeballs" - a wonderful game that could be extended indefinitely by retrieving the found eyeballs and redistributing them around the garden. Not sure that will work next year on 5-year olds! Then it was a series of "pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey" type games, with Halloween twists. Daniel won the pin-the-bow-tie-on-the-skeleton game and Max came closest in the "pin-the-nose-on-the-jack-o-lantern" game, but I will admit that they blatantly cheated, pulling the blindfold down or peeking around the sides of their noses.