Halloween 2013

Back in October none of our boys really understood anything about dressing up or anything like that for Halloween. Which means that I had to pick costumes for them that I thought they would be willing to wear. I decided to go with a Cars theme for these little guys and they were super excited about their costumes and no one seemed jealous of anyone else so we'll call it a win!

First up for Halloween was going to our church's fall festival and trunk or treat. And for the 3rd year in a row that we have taken our kids to this, our kids were pretty awful. Maybe I'll get more into that later. We didn't get any pictures while we were there because it was crazy.

Then a couple days later we went to Jacob's teacher's church's trunk or treat. After experiencing our own church's trunk or treat and feeling like it was terrible, we didn't really have high hopes for this other trunk or treat. However we felt like it would be fun for Jacob to see his teacher somewhere besides school and we knew the boys would be excited to wear their costumes.

This trunk or treat was awesome! The boys loved it and overall were pretty well behaved. They even had a fire truck there the boys got to climb up in. Jacob loved seeing his teacher - especially since she and her husband were dressed up with Angry Birds shirts and had their own little Angry Birds game to play at their truck.

Halloween night we decided to take the boys around our neighborhood. They were really excited and got upset when we wanted them to stand for pictures instead of rushing out the door as soon as their costumes were on.

Not many houses in our neighborhood were participating in Halloween so even though we walked a long way for 3 little boys with little legs, there weren't a whole lot of houses we stopped at. The houses that were giving out candy were being super generous so our kids' buckets were almost full by the time we got home. Funny thing about that is that Jeremy doesn't like candy at all and Jacob is very picky about candy; Joel is our only child who goes crazy for candy.

In case you were wondering what made our church's trunk or treat and Jacob's teacher's church's trunk or treat so much different here it is:

Our church always schedules the fall festival to start somewhere around 6 or 6:30pm (one year it may have even started at 7). They have somewhere around 6 activities inside the church building for the kids to rotate between. However the activities aren't very time consuming activities and it doesn't take long before your kids have done them all. Multiple times. For some reason they always schedule the trunk or treat not to start until 8 or 8:30. When your kids are usually in bed by 8 and don't handle being up late very well, this results in screaming upset children who are bored, over-stimulated and tired. We had just kind of resigned ourselves to thinking that this is just how trunk or treats are.

Jacob's teacher's church does theirs completely different. Members of the church choose to decorate their car and pass out candy in the parking lot. No one goes into the church building at all. And most of the vehicles had activities at their vehicle - the same type of activities they had at ours, but when almost every vehicle has an activity - that is way more for the kids to do. You go to a vehicle, participate in the activity (kicking a ball, knocking down a toilet paper pyramid, etc.) and then get your treat, then you go on to the next car. Not to mention that the trunk or treat started at 3 or 4 in the afternoon when our kids were not tired and needing to go to bed. Not all the vehicles had activities and not all of them had decorated - some were just there to pass out candy.

This would be so, so much better if our church did it this way - no one would be in charge of making sure all the activities were covered because if you brought your vehicle and had an activity, you are in charge of it. Genius!