{happy halloween 2010}

Last year at Halloween, CP was only 4 weeks old. Our little pumpkin was barely bigger than a jack-o-lantern. He went trick-or-treating but, as far as I could tell, had no idea what was going on, and couldn't have cared less about this thing called "candy."

What a difference a year makes.

By the time trick-or-treating started this year, Connor had already eaten at least 3 kit-kat bars, and knew how to sort the good stuff (the reese's) from the merely mediocre candy (plain hershey's).

When he found out that he was going to have to share this bounty with the trick-or-treaters who came to the door, he did his best to scare the neighborhood away:



I wasn't sure what to expect from this year's trick-or-treating. I'd kind of anticipated that CP might spend about 10 minutes outside, visiting our next-door neighbors, then hanging out inside, watching the costumed kids from behind the glass storm door for the rest of the evening. CP totally blew those expectations out of the water. I should have known that any event would be a hit that involved (a) people loudly exclaiming how cute he was; and (b) giving him candy.

Our little frog liked to pick out his own candy-- waving the twizzlers wildly, giving the mike & ike's box a good shake, grabbing an entire handful of mini milky ways. Sometimes he would put the candy in his orange plastic pumpkin. Sometimes he would keep it grasped in his tiny fist. Sometimes he would slowly and indecisively select 3 different kinds of candy. Sometimes he would just stare, wide-eyed, until someone plopped a bag of mini-pretzels into his pumpkin bucket. Sometimes he would take a piece of candy, then re-gift a piece out of his pumpkin to the halloween hostess. Sometimes he would abandon his orange pumpkin and run away giggling and grasping a snickers bar. It was so much fun.

He only trick-or-treated about 4 houses away in each direction, but loved bopping around our driveway all evening, watching all of the older kids. He put his full prince-in-disguise frog charm on a 3 year old ladybug who wrapped her arms around Connor and exclaimed "he's just so cute!!!"

Unfortunately for Connor, we ran out of candy at 7:15... {this MAY be POSSIBLY related to the fact that Shawn and I single-handedly ate 2 bags of our reese's and a bag of kit-kats before any kids showed up at our house but this theory has not been tested in a double-blind peer-reviewed clinical trial so let's not jump to any conclusions}... so we had to give away the peanut's loot. Then we turned off our lights and hid in our house until 8:00 so as not to either (a) break the hearts of earnest trick-or-treaters arriving after 7:30 and/or (b) get our house bombarded with flaming toilet paper thrown by enraged, barely-costumed teenagers.

It was a good day.