Last weekend we went to a friend's house and carved pumpkins. These days everyone buys these special carving kits that let you do amazing designs that put to shame all those primitive jack-o-lanterns of yore. Nathan is fascinated by skeletons these days (he wants to be a doctor when he grows up), so we carved the middle one in this picture:
I say "we" but of course it was really Stowe. I helped by cleaning out the inside guts and punching the design, but she did all the carving. Martha, as always, helped by looking cute:
Unfortunately for our Halloween decorations, the weather last week was beautiful and warm, so our nicely-carved jack-o-lanterns rotted before the Big Day and we had to throw them out.
But of course you don't need pumpkins to go trick-or-treating. Our kids dressed up this year in their favorite costumes: Leah as a fairy princess, Nathan as a dinosaur ("T-Rex", he clarifies), and Martha as a cute little mouse.
It didn't take much time to circle our neighborhood, but the bounty was plentiful.
Too bad our kids don't eat candy. All of these treats disappeared somehow after they were in bed.
Stowe stayed home to dish out treats to the kids who came to our house. We had a total of 47, and to make it interesting she made a point of asking each kid to name his or her school. As you might expect, most were from our local elementary school, but there was a surprising amount of diversity of schools:
Figure 1: Trick-or-treaters breakdown by school