A Spooktacular Halloween

The weeks and days leading up to Halloween have been so much fun.  Charlotte has loved seeing all the pumpkins everywhere.  When we asked her what she wanted to be, she always resoundingly said "Pumpkin!" We did get her a cute pumpkin shirt and some black leggings, so she got plenty of use out of those. She's also asked to watch "Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin" every single day. 

But first, to get us even more in the mood for Halloween, we visited a pumpkin patch a few weeks ago.

She insisted on sitting on the pumpkins, which of course makes it look like she's sitting on something else

Driving an old tractor

Sitting on an old truck

And of course there was Halloween.  We never did find a pumpkin costume that we really liked, so when I saw a hula girl costume while we were in Hawaii, it seemed like a great option. It was also nearly 80 degrees yesterday, so it was the perfect outfit to wear on an unseasonably warm Halloween night.

Obviously it would be a tad risque to let her out with a thin fabric bikini top, so I put the top on underneath.

As I mentioned, Charlotte has loved Halloween, and we were confident that she thought everything was great and not scary.  She loved all the spiders and spider webs we used to decorate our entryway. When we carved our pumpkin, Chris asked if she wanted a funny face or scary face. Charlotte replied "Scary face!" and pointed to the scariest face in our series of templates.

Our scary Jack-O-Lantern!

So we were super excited to take her out Trick-Or-Treating.  We went to the house adjacent to ours, and Charlotte loved the decorations - orange twinkle lights - and the neighbors' calico cat. Then we went across the street to one of the homes that was very well decorated for Halloween, and there were moving ghouls, goblins and monsters everywhere.  We did not anticipate her response to animatronics. Poor Charlotte froze, and ran behind my leg. She was visibly frightened and would not let go of me.

Luckily, we went across the street from the "scary" house to the home where we met all our neighbors last year.  Unbelievably, we have not talked to these great neighbors since the day that Santa came through the neighborhood.  It's just that with our house on the side of theirs, and on a different street, we just never see them.  But they all remembered Charlotte.  And since their house is where all the neighbors congregate before Trick-Or-Treating, we were invited inside for drinks and food. So neighborly!  Once again, we admired their amazing kitchen remodel and know exactly what we'll do when we save the money up for our own (it's quite an endeavor and requires some new construction).  Anyway, Charlotte was regaining her confidence by going down their awesome backyard slide and eating apple slices with caramel sauce, until it was time to head back out into the neighborhood. Two of the boys were dressed in these crazy Roman centurion costumes with a skeleton mask, and they freaked Charlotte out.  She clung to my leg once again.

Ultimately, we did end up making it to about 10 houses, although I had to nudge her to go to each door.  We would have gone to more, but Charlotte wanted me to carry her from house to house, and I just can't do that anymore.  One high school girl who answered the door was so smitten by Charlotte that she asked her to do a little hula dance, and Charlotte happily obliged.  I'll have to seek her out to see if she does babysitting. :) I think Charlotte had much more fun being at home and answering the door for our meager amount of Trick-Or-Treaters. She would shout "People are coming! People are coming!"  We had to shut down the Trick-Or-Treating at around 8:45 because Charlotte would not calm down and go to sleep. She jumped out of bed every time the doorbell rang.

All in all, a pretty fun evening.  And we have to find a way to hang out with those neighbors again.  They're so fun.  Maybe we just shout at them from the backyard??  Now to move on to getting Charlotte excited about turkeys and Thanksgiving.  I love this time of year!