Is it just me, or has Halloween turned into a month-long celebration?!?! Maybe it was because I bought Gavin's costume in mid-September and he gladly wore it as often as possible, but this year Halloween was definitely longer than the official one-day holiday!
Gavin's SpiderMan obsession continues (and continues to surprise Eric & I since he's never watched an episode of the show - just knows it from the marketing campaigns), so when I saw a SpiderMan muscle costume at Target one day, I just had to bring it home. His reaction to it was just as wonderful as I could have expected! Success! :) So here he is wearing it one of the first times, when we met our friends, the Etshokins, new puppy -
And visiting Auntie Mar & Grandpa - one of our many stops on Halloween:
Hallie is getting really good at making animal noises, so up until the week before Halloween I was searching for a cute, toddler-appropriate kitty costume - which was apparently not meant to be. So then I thought she'd go as Dora, since both kids looooove Dora and Diego these days, but those costumes all consisted of only Dora's purple shorts, orange t-shirt and dark wig - definitely not MN weather appropriate. Sooo... I kept looking, and kept coming back to an adorable Abby Cadabby costume - 
she's one of the newer muppets (or more correctly a "fairy in training") on Sesame Street -and she has the same pigtails that Hallie sports more often than not these days! So I finally decided to order it the week before Halloween, only to find that Debbie was having her annual costume party at daycare the following Tuesday. So of course that Abby Cadabby costume wasn't going to arrive in time. Luckily, Hallie has an adorable older cousin, Anna, who at one time dressed up as an adorable duck ("What does a duck say?" "Duck, duck!") and Hallie was able to borrow that costume for the daycare party... but I apparently have no pictures of that. :( But here is as Abby Cadabby:
We bought pumpkins late one night the week before Halloween, intending to carve them that weekend... but the more I thought about it, and realized that I was not going to get any help from Eric, and if Gavin's reaction to the "guts" was anything like it was last year (he was completely appalled) I figured out I was going to be completely on my own in this and opted not to carve them at all. But I heard about it later, when the Sunday after Halloween Gavin ran to me and said "Hey - we never made our Jack O Lanterns!!" I explained that yeah, unfortunately Halloween came and went already and we never had time to carve them and he replied "Well maybe it can be Halloween again tomorrow!" I love his positive outlook, but not that he's now trying to make this into a two-month holiday!! :)Oh, and another funny thing that the kids started doing in honor of the holiday was "practicing" trick-or-treating. Gavin was usually the instigator, but Hallie happily followed close behind! Gavin would tell me to go in the pantry, and then those two would stand outside, knocking on the door yelling "trick or treat!" - pretty darn cute, and a very sneaky way to get way more candy than I would have otherwise allowed!
At Great Grandma's :
