Halloween 2008

Halloween is definitely one of my favorite holidays when it comes to being able to plan fun activities for the kids. I really do not like all of the morbid or spooky paraphernalia that is typically associated with the day but I absolutely love dressing the kids up in cute costumes and planning innocent, unscary fun for them. Of course the overabundance of candy is every parent's nightmare but my thoughts are that Halloween is one day a year so what's one extra candy corn for a day!

This year one of my playgroups planned a trip to a local nursing home to trick-or-treat and visit with the elderly folks. What a wonderful way to spend the morning before Halloween (plus the boys got to wear their costumes for two days in a row!). The residents of Rockhill Mennonite Community obviously had their entire day brightened when ten toddlers and infants came to visit them. What a blessing it was to see the little ones interact with them. Unfortunately I did not get any good photos with the elderly folks during our visit since I was holding Nate the entire time, but I did get a few of the boys alone.

Happy Halloween from Ben the dinosaur and Nate the pumpkin, all dressed up and about to leave for the nursing home.

At Rockhill Community. Here, Ben was showing one of the residents his baby brother.

Nate (minus his hat) smiles widely as one of the elderly folks ohhs and ahhs over him.

On Friday, for the actual Halloween day, I suffered a bout of temporary insanity when I decided to host a Halloween party for our closest friends and their kids and a few of the children in Ben and Nate's playgroups whom they interact with the most....at our currently unoccupied, still entirely under construction, new house in Telford. What an idea but it turned out to be a lot of fun.

My thoughts actually were that the three rooms where we would be would be basically finished, we would just have no furniture yet. So, after bringing in some folding tables and chairs and some decorations, we ended up with a Halloween party being hosted in an area that offered lots of space for the kids to run around in a big old house. Great setting for a Halloween party, huh? We also were able to show our friends all of the progress Andrew has been making on the house over the past 6 weeks since he has been getting so much done.

So, it seemed to really work out and everyone seemed to have fun. We certainly did! It was a bit hectic for me since I had to transport everything over but in the end I am glad we did it.

Here's Nate in his "pre-costume" attire, a Halloween outfit, of course! He is sitting on Nana's lap. They were able to visit for the weekend to help me out with the party and also to help with the kids since the day after we had an extremely hectic day of house showings.

Nate and Jonathan Saunders eating Cheerios and playing together in costume. At one point, they actually appeared to be having an actual conversation, babbling to each other and looking at each other as they interacted. So cute!

Elaina Saunders in her duck costume, smiling as she ate dinner.

The three Nice boys (yes, their last name is actually Nice in addition to being very polite, "nice" boys!) :)...they are doing the craft I planned: decorating faces on pumpkin-shaped Cheerio treats with various candies.

We had a Halloween beanbag toss game and a pinata. Here are Ben, Kyle and Samantha playing the beanbag toss.

..And the pinata. There were definitely mixed feelings about this one. It was difficult for the kids to break open so luckily we had a few older kids at the party. Ben also seemed sad that the pumpkin-head pinata was busted in half and kept telling me to put him back together! Of course, he and others enjoyed scrambling around for the candy!

In all of our chaos getting ready for the party, I forgot to take pictures of the food I made and the decorations :(. Here are some of the desserts that we had leftover. Ben had fun helping with the spider cupcakes and black cat cookies!

After the party, many of us went trick-or-treating together. Thank God it was actually a very nice night outside, not too cold or windy. Ben was tired at first but once he got a second wind, he really enjoyed trick-or-treating. It was the same story as last year, I remember.