Trunk or Treat

Our church has a fun event for the kids each Halloween called Trunk or Treat. The Saturday before Halloween, we start the evening off with a party with games and prizes for the kids. While the kids are occupied finding their friends and oohing and ahhing over all the creative costumes, the parents can set up for Trunk or Treat. In our particular church building, we have a sidewalk all the way around a square building with parking spaces right at the sidewalk. So adults back their vehicles in, open their trunks and set up a candy-giving space. Some people get very creative and decorate their trunks with scary themes, while others simply pass out goodies to all the kids.

Trunk or Treat provides a safe environment for the kids to get Halloween goodies and enjoy a large party with lots of friends and familiar faces, except the ones they don't recognize due to costumes.

With all that said, we had Trunk or Treat last night. I do not recall a time when my kids were more excited about a single event. All day they would ask, "When are we going to Trunk or Treat? Can we put on our costumes, yet?" After holding them off all day, I started the costuming process...Al had to work so I was flying solo and was SOOO glad we had simple costumes this year as opposed to the clown costumes we'd had the past couple of years that requires so much time for face painting.

This year, we had Batman and Catwoman 1 & Catwoman 2. When Isabel saw Lillee in a black cat costume, she had to have a black cat outfit, too.

Fortunately, Al made it home in time to join us for the evening...I would have never survived all the chasing for the night. The kids had a great time, but due to the rain we could not actually go outside to the cars so the activities committee set up little rooms for adults to decorate and create candy corners all over the church building.

There are a couple of things I learned from this experience.

1. Face painting is not so important for the completion of a costume...at least when you're 2 & 3 years old. I was able to get a picture of the girls with their very simple kitty cat faces on, but I had to reapply Isabel's before the picture and then reapplied both of them before leaving the house...also before we left the house, it was gone again.

2. I took a handful of pictures of the kids in their costumes and realized how dirty my walls are! I've been saying for the past month that I need to wash all the walls because there's handprints everywhere and I've yet to get around to it. Wait...now that I think about it, I was scrubbing walls the last week I was pregnant with Connor (I went from 1cm to 4-5cm that week). Maybe I'll hold off for awhile :)