Always Room for One More: Halloween Snaps

Halloween was as fun as always. No rain this year meant a casual trick-or-treating as opposed to last year's mad dash to get the candy before the flood gates opened. Elias truly joined the festivities for the first time this year and he adored his Tin Man hat, wearing it most of Saturday and for Trick-or-Treating on Sunday. And this was also the first year Abigail was able to anticipate the upcoming evening of scurrying from house to house, admiring Jack-o-Lanterns and gigantic blow-up Winnie-the-Pooh Vampires while inspecting the candy being kindly dropped into her bag.

I know that many of our friends avoid the holiday of Halloween and choose not to have their children dress in costumes and join others in the annual candy plunder. But for Scott and I, this is one of the few traditions from our mutual childhoods that has made it with us into our own family. Between the sheer size of our family and the homeschooling, church planting and living in one location for more than a couple of years, our children's childhood looks very different from our own. I enjoy the unadulterated tradition as we design and make costumes together which inevitably brings about stories from Halloweens from when I was a little girl.

The temperature was a deliciously brisk 55 degrees and we decided it was time to head home around 7:45, which was about the same time we discovered Elias's hands were cold enough to refrigerate meat. The kids enjoyed their usual five pieces of candy before bed and we all joined around the dining room table early on November 1st to partake in the Annual Rutherford Candy Breakfast. Which, as always, was followed by lots of manual labor in order to burn off the sugar rush.

Happy Halloween!