Halloween

Alden and Sophia reunited for Halloween. There was much embracing and kissing and insane amounts cuteness all around. They haven't seen each other for almost 2 months and I feel awful that I've kept them apart for so long. I blame my insane work schedule and a general lack of social organizational skills.
Alden and Sophia met in Boothbay Harbor for the Halloween parade and trick-or-treating downtown extravaganza. There were hundreds of kids and some really creative costumes. Alden had a bit of a hard time nailing down what he wanted to be. "A froggie and a fireman and a pumpkin" was his final decision, which left me scratching my head for ways to make his chimeric, but very earnest little dream come true. Karen made some fantastic animal heads for Kerstin and Geoff when they were kids and found a bunch of these in her attic, which included a frog. One down, two to go. I'm completely hopeless when it comes to handcrafted, lovingly sewn costumes, (or any sewing for that matter), and my free time has been nonexistent as of late, so I knew that making a firefighter's jacket was out of the question. I'd therefore resigned to shelling out cash for some tacky costume off the RiteAid seasonal rack or whatever, but I lucked out. Alden's school had one in their costume collection that his teacher let me borrow. Score!!

Two down, that left only the pumpkin. This part was easy. I figured I'd buy Alden one of those ubiquitous plastic Halloween pumpkin totes and call it done. While shopping for one, I found a tasteful felt pumpkin bag and figured I'd give him an upgrade.

So there you have it folks - a froggie and a fireman and a pumpkin. Kerstin and I wore matching Panda heads, courtesy of Karen circa 1976. Sophia was an adorable ladybug with a matching ladybug bag embroidered with her name - very high on the cuteness index!
The festivities started on the lawn of the Boothbay Harbor Library, and snaked through town, with merchants at every shop ready to fill Alden's bag with an amazing array of candies he never even knew existed. He was thunderstruck by the abundance and diversity of his haul. We don't let him eat candy, so this was more of an educational experience for Alden than we'd anticipated. Let's just say his horizons have been greatly expanded.
We've all learned that Alden really likes lollipops and peanut butter M&Ms. He's not fond of KitKats. We're not giving him gum, but other than that we'll probably let him sample everything and see what he thinks. He's a very particular eater, even (or especially!) when it comes to sweets, so I feel good knowing that he'll likely reject about half of his candies.

Checkin' out the ninja's stash.

The specter you see before is not some ghost of Halloween, but rather a very excited kid hopped up on sweeteners. I love that you can't even make out his feet in this image and it looks like he's literally flying. Alden was riding the sugar dragon pretty hard when we got home, but crashed hard too which made bedtime a relative breeze.
Happy Halloween!!