Piya's Perspective

This year, Simeon dressed up as a Dragonsaurus.  We got a number of “what an adorable dragon!”, “ooh a dinosaur” and even a few “look an alligator.”  Basically, it was the cutest and warmest costume we could find at the party shop last weekend.  The weather is generally pretty nasty, so we wanted something to keep him warm and dry.  Of course, the weather was actually quite nice…he was even getting hot in the outfit in the afternoon.

I tried to take a bunch of pictures, but unfortunately, the two pictures I got with great big smiles on his face are blurry – too blurry to easily fix :(.  So the one where you can’t see much of his face will have to do :s.

This year the trick or treating started with the daycare parade.  All the kids at the daycare get dressed up and go around the office complex.  For the younger classes, the kids all put the candy they got into the ‘class’ bags that would later get divvied up between all the kids.  Simeon loved taking a piece of candy and putting it in the class bag. Er…any bag actually, there were a few times where he would put his collected candy in the next container and take a different piece of candy.  The last stop was in front of my building, so rather than going back to the daycare first, we went upstairs to my office and let him collect from some of my coworkers.  I wound up trading his collected candy for a box of animal crackers with one of the daycare teachers (making sure to keep some of the playdough).

Now…our neighborhood really gets into the holiday.  The ‘Church on the Ridge’ sets up stands with hand warmers, coffee and hot chocolate.  There are trailers decorated as castles that shuttle the kids to different places.  And this year, there was an EMT vehicle down the street handing out glow sticks for kids and parents.  And the trick-or-treaters are non-stop.  When we finally got home around 6pm, the doorbell was ringing two seconds after we stepped in the door, without lights on in the entry way or on the porch.  Within 15 minutes or so, we opened up shop and the kids kept coming until we ran out 2 hours later.  Even then we got one more kid (and a parent) with the lights off.  Sometime in there, we got Simeon dressed up again and I took him out.  I had only planned to stop at a couple of the neighbors we know, but Simeon quickly understood the deal and also seemed to understand lights on meant open for business.  So we stopped at about 10 houses total.  At one point, I told Ari he should go check out our neighbors’ coffin (see below).  When he got back he mentioned that our nextdoor neighbors, who have counted kids in the past, gave up counting kids this year and just counted candy.  When he stopped by to say hello they had counted 300-something.  Do note we live on one of the major streets in the community, so we get more traffic than many other areas.  But still…300+!

Highlight 1:  Over the weekend, we saw one neighbor building a coffin.  The older boy dressed up as a skeleton and laid in the coffin last night to scare the kids as they took candy.  He seemed to think scaring kids was quite worth not collecting his own candy.

Highlight 2:  Best costume had to be the mime.  Not so much for the costume, but for his prop.  He didn’t say a word.  Just showed his sign that read “Trick or Treat”.  Then turned it around to display “Thank You.  (Applause)”.