Halloween 2013

I'm starting to think our Halloween's are a little big jinxed. Oh, we always look forward to Halloween and have great fun with all our traditions. But I've started to notice that we seem to have strange things happen near or on Halloween about every other year.

2009: I got Swine Flu on Halloween. Granted I didn't realize it was Swine Flu till a few days later. But I could tell I was coming down with something and I felt darn awful.
2011: The day before Halloween we crashed our truck through the garage and out the back wall. We spent most of Halloween dealing with insurance agencies, getting a rental car and trying to pick through the mess to see if their was anything to salvage. We didn't even get around to carving pumpkins that year. (See "That's a pretty big oops" here)
2013: Within a week of Halloween this year Rebekah got in a car accident (thankfully she was not hurt, nor was it her fault), Julianne's English teacher was arrested for having an inappropriate relationship with the male student T.A. in Julianne's class, and Brandon broke his nose at gymnastics (well, maybe...we never did get it x-rayed).

Makes me wonder what's in store for us in 2015...

Regardless, we had a great time this year.
Halloween Costume Fashion Show:

REBEKAH aka Tinker Bell
This was her costume for the big Halloween Dance. Her date dressed up as Peter Pan. (Pictures and stories soon to come...)

JULIANNE aka Snow White
She and her friends decided to coordinate Halloween costumes this year with a Disney princess theme. Originally Julianne was to be Rapunzel, but after looking in 4 different stores and only finding Rapunzel costumes meant for toddlers, we gave up in the interest of time and went with Snow White instead.
Julianne had a rehearsal for "The Little Mermaid" on Halloween afternoon. Sigh. Her director moved up the time so the kids could be done by 7:30, an hour earlier than normal. And though I understood why, seeing as Thursday was their normal rehearsal day and their show was opening in one week, I was still not excited about her being gone. But being a teenager meant that festivities with her friends would still be going strong when she got home.

BRANDON aka umm....skin man? Or something?
I'm not sure what you call this costume. But there sure were a lot of kids wearing various colors of this same thing.
Brandon ended up still having a gymnastics workout on Halloween. His coach moved the time up to earlier in the day, and cut it to three hours rather than four, thankfully. Though I wasn't thrilled with the idea of a workout on Halloween at all, it did mean that Brandon ended up bringing teammate Porter home to trick-or-treat with him.

LILIAN aka Mummy
I'm not sure where the idea came from, but Lilian was insistent that a mummy was what she wanted to be. Certainly it was a less expensive costume than the other three kids so hooray for that. Apparently we didn't wrap her quite as securely as we thought seeing as half way through the evening she started to unravel and trail her wrappings out behind her. But hey, made for a good leash when I needed her to slow down....

For the third year running Heather and family joined us again for Halloween this year...one of our very favorites of Halloween traditions. And per tradition, Heather and I took pictures together out on the front porch.This year, a gangster and Superman. Well, more homage to the Man of Steel than anything else, really.

Other pictures of our Halloween night festivities....

It was a comic book style superhero theme at the Elliott's home this year. (Past years have included Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Dracula) "Superman" was pleased with my choice of attire. "Batman" on the other hand, jokingly told me that I needed to get out of his yard. Hmph. He had told me earlier that this year was to be all about superheroes...he just didn't specify which one was his superhero of choice. haha.
After Superman and I posed together Lilian pulled me aside and shyly asked, "Do you think I could get a picture with him too??"

(And in the interest of full disclosure, I totally lifted a couple of these pictures from Facebook because they were so much better than what I got in the dark with my little iPhone camera. Clearly I need to start hauling around my nice camera with me trick-or-treating. So Rob, if you are reading this....thanks!)


And then down the street we also had the 2nd annual Shadows of Fear haunted house that raises money for charity. This place was hopping and had a good 40 minute wait to get in. But there was also plenty to keep you entertained in line...people were dancing to "Thriller", there was a fire-juggling creepy clown...just to name a few.

Lilian and I lost our place in line and missed our opportunity to go through the haunted house because she "had to go potty." I'm not feeling to bad about missing it. Impressive as it supposedly was, I'm a chicken....

















And of course Halloween is not complete without doing the candy inventory and swap. Here's Porter, Brandon, Noah, Garett and Lilian all going through and sorting their stash...