First Trick-or-Treating

After 10 years of childless living in apartments and condos, we missed years of real trick-or-treats. So I  knew we'd found a great family-friendly neighborhood when the people around our new rental home kept warning us: "Look out for Halloween! There are hundreds of kids and the traffic is awful."

PERFECT!

Before we moved from Florida, I figured I'd get Jessica an Elmo costume, since she loved him so much. I found a thick, warm long-sleeved one at the consignment store, and bought it, hoping we'd be moving to a colder climate by October.

I got Jessica the classic pumpkin bucket, and we practiced. We read Halloween books, and watched It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown several times. These are important childhood skills, you know. Very  American. I told her to knock on every door inside our house and rewarded her "Trick or Treat", "Happy Halloween", or "thank you" with candy corns. Because are few parenting tools better than repetition, time & love, combined with sugar.

She didn't get to use her awesome door-knocking skills at the church trunk-or-treat, or Halloween night, since most people sat in their driveways. Here's Jessica with our really nice neighbors with our house in the background.

We tagged along with a few other young families. Dave heeded our neighbors advice to get home before traffic started at 5 pm. We parked our car next to the mailbox at our landlords' request, since they'd lost mailboxes to Halloween and the annual neighborhood garage sale.

It was perfect weather. We saw several other little Elmos, and when we were done, we sat in our driveway and gave away huge bowls of candy. Last year's Halloween traffic jam resulted in cars being towed to clear the roads. This year the police put signs up at the neighborhood entrance that any non-residents would be towed, the crowd was half as big and just right.

 And we knew what to do with all that candy!