ThugBaby Flora (see the picture at right to understand the nickname) did not go trick or treating this year. It seemed unnecessary for a child who does not have teeth or eat solid food. However, she helped me hand out candy to the first half of our trick-or-treaters by sleeping in her wrap. Once she woke up, she needed to be fed, so Sean took over treat dispensing duty for awhile.
I took Leia and Flora for a walk in daylight before the trick-or-treaters started, and Leia was quite bothered by some makeshift graves with hands and bodies coming out of them at the well-decorated house down the street. She spent some time barking at them until I could get her to keep going. That house goes all out with music, lights and everything every year, and we can hear the screams from our house. It must be scary because our next-door neighbour’s son (who’s about five) wanted to see it, and by the time he got to our house, he was still a little teary-eyed. Sounds like it would be too scary for me!
The best costume of the night belong to a little girl who was in a beautiful dress, long blonde wig, tiara and zombie makeup. “I’m a dead princess”, she told me when I complimented her costume. I told her that I was a dead beauty queen in high school. Great minds think alike.
We had about 185 kids in just under two hours (we shut the lights off around 8:30pm). It didn’t feel like that many, but we had 210 pieces of candy (in three 70-count boxes), and we were careful to hand out only one piece to each kid (minus our neighbour’s kids who got two each, and the kid who saw the extra piece that I dropped). We only had a few kids come without costumes. (How can their parents let them go like that?) Almost all the kids said thank you.
And now that this is over, the Christmas decorating frenzy will start…
