Halloweening

Another fun Halloween in the books! I'm especially glad Lindsay came to join us for this one. Which is a big change for her - they've spent the last ten or so with Dave's fam. But since she wanted to come see Sammy this weekend, we got to have her. Lindsay and I enjoyed visiting Sammy after the 5K and before the afternoon adventures started. No pictures - it just doesn't seem right to take a bunch of photo with Sammy in this condition. But the good news is that I think she's on the upswing. A tracheotomy was never what we imagined for our girl, but it's doing the job of giving us more time with her, so I'm grateful. Anyways, back to Halloween....
So - here's how we roll with costumes:  I just have a big bin of them in the playroom/basement, and the kids go down and put something on!
I collect them all year from various sources. Makes it easy, cheap and fast :)  They changed costumes for the different events we went to - sometimes several times.
We lucked out with the weather big time! It was perfect. Not rainy and not too cold at all. There were even girls out trick or treating in their homecoming dresses (because for some odd reason the HS had it tonight).
I love that Brian is wearing the adult CLOWN costume. Had to beg him to do it. It was a hit with everyone. I think it's laaaaame when adults don't dress up, or at least wear something festive. I have pumpkin earrings I was quite proud of wearing - even to church :)  Meredith was gorgeous in her big pink dress. Cougar's Elmo costume was awesome. Charity looked sweet in her yellow duck, but refused to keep the hood on, so missed the full effect.  Isn't Bennett's pirate costume great?! Loved it.

I'm definitely not a fan of all the sugar... but we're keeping it under control, and hoping to give most of it to our dentist for his candy buy-back next weekend ;)  Gotta teach my kids to appreciate dollars over candy!
I put all their candy in a bag and weighed it - 13.8 pounds! And that's after I spent 2 hours giving out a bunch of their candy to our trick or treaters!  (we didn't have enough - and I bought over 300 lollipops!!)  I ordered them from Amazon - the YummyEarth Organic lollipops.  But I ended up keeping a bunch and giving out the kid's stuff instead that I don't want them eating - stuff like laffy taffys, jolly ranchers, starburst and tootsie rolls that are especially nasty for their teeth. And all the really weird stuff like Cheetos and random chinese/mexican candy that they got.  SHHHHHH, don't tell them :)  They won't even notice. I kept all the good stuff - snickers, reeses etc.
I'm just glad it was Fast Sunday weekend, so I stopped eating around 4pm. Otherwise I might've partook of a few too many of those favorites :)

I really enjoyed sitting on the porch with Lindsay passing out candy. It was fun and relaxing. We had our water fountain going, Charity watching youtube Frozen clips, Courtney assisting with distribution, and me getting away with being really silly to the trick or treaters  ("hey! you need to SING for your candy!")
Funny how Courtney preferred to hang out with me than go door to door! Sweet girl. Just wanna gobble her up.




LADYBUG!
This cute costume was a gift from her Grandma last year.  We barely squeezed one more year out of it!

So awesome - picked up a bunch of these cards (photo of Jesus on front, info on back) from the trunk or treat and ended up passing them out to our own trick or treaters later on. Just spreading the SWEET message of the Gospel ;) #BecauseHeLives