another spooktacular year!

Halloween was a fun event, as per usual, and now we've been eating far too much candy, as per usual, and there is still like 20 pounds leftover, as per usual.  Good times!
The first celebration was a no-kids party hosted by some friends in the neighborhood; we had a quick and easy costume ready to go -

It's Bob Ross (the painter) and a Happy Tree.  Haha.
The second event was the ward Fall Festival (AKA early Halloween chaos), always highly popular with the kids.  Kip and I wore our costumes again but the most fun was watching the kids:
Ella wanted to be a Swedish Folk Dancer, so this was my best effort - not too shabby, I thought.  She is beautiful!

 Fancy hair

 

 Scary lady vampire (wait until you see the pictures from Halloween Day!)

 and skeleton:

 

 Buddies!

 And finally, Caleb returned to his Minecraft efforts and made a new, more mobile costume - this is Hero Bryan, apparently a virus that kills people in the game. 

Let the candy commence!

We waited all the way until Halloween day to carve our pumpkins, not for any reason other than Kip's been gone a lot and we've had other things to do.  But it was fun that way, took up some of our "waiting time" before it was time to trick-or-treat.  We only had three pumpkins from our garden efforts this year, but one was a whopper and made it all worth it!  According our scientific measuring, this guy was 55.4 pounds!

 We had friends Debbie, Bella, and Tannin with us to celebrate!

 Everyone wanted to put their hands in the big pumpkin.

 McKinley: "Mom, my pumpkin is dyeing her hair black."  I love her concentration faces!

 

Then, at long last, real trick-or-treating.  The kids were outside playing, including neighbors, so they all got ready and met up together.   Nothing like a group of TWELVE kids hitting houses, right?!

Remember I mentioned Rachel's scary Halloween face? Here it is again!OOOhh - scary.

Only 2 more, because McKinley:

 and because the pumpkins! (the littler ones are all from our trip to the farm)

Happy Halloween! (whew!)