Happy Halloween!

Will and Anna just finished up two nights of Halloween festivities.  This year, they dressed up as Darth Vader and Yoda.

Here they are before going to Trunk-or-Treat at our church last night:

Anna is holding Monkey Joe, the kindergarten class pet.  He was our guest for the weekend, and we were supposed to log his adventures in a notebook that accompanied him.  You can imagine how thrilled I was to see him on a weekend in which John was working and I was fighting a nasty cold.  I had planned to spend most of the weekend on the couch with the kids watching Disney movies and nursing my sinus headache with some serious cold medicine, but was shamed into action by the accountability of that notebook.  So I persevered and came up with some "adventures" for Monkey Joe, the last of which was dressing him up in our Nemo costume for Trunk-or-Treat.  Cute, right? Although now I'm thinking we should have foregone the costume and just pretended he was an Ewok. :-)

The kids with their light sabers:

Yep, that's Will in there!  He even had a battery-operated device that did the heavy Darth Vader breathing.

Will walked around with his light saber extended, but Anna insisted on keeping hers folded down--that is, until she saw anything that she perceived as a threat.  While trick-or-treating tonight, she stopped suddenly, laid down her treat bag, carefully extended her saber, and then waved it at a moss-laden tree, muttering "Bad guys.  Dats bad guys."  When she felt the tree was sufficiently tamed, she folded the saber back up and went on trick-or-treating.

A few pictures from Trunk-or-Treat---lots of candy-laden car trunks, fun games, and bouncy houses:

Even Sith lords and Jedi masters enjoy a good bouncy slide:

We went to a Halloween party tonight and then went trick-or-treating.  After about 6 houses, Will announced that he had all the candy he wanted, because he didn't want to get fat.  I think maybe I've been stressing healthy food choices too much!  Anna was just getting the hang of it, so we let her go up to several more houses--she did it, all by herself, yelling "Trick or treat!  Candy?"  She also gave the stink-eye to one nice lady who gave Will some M&M's but went back inside to get a packet of pretzels just for Anna--I think the lady thought Anna was too young to enjoy M&M's, but Anna thoroughly disagreed. She looooves her chocolate...I think I know whose sweet tooth she inherited!