Happy Halloween!

Hello, friends! Annabelle here again, still basking in the afterglow of my first Halloween. Can you believe there’s a holiday where you go door-to-door, begging people for candy, and instead of calling the cops, people actually give it to you! This world is awesome!

Mom and Dad were particularly excited about this Halloween. I’ve been told that they didn’t enjoy the holiday nearly as much back when they were living in a condo, because they never got any trick-or-treaters. [Editor’s note: The five separate locked doors between the building’s front door and our front door may have had something to do with that.] But since we’re now in a house this year, they had their jack-o-lanterns all set up and bought a few gigantic bags of candy, ready for the onslaught of tiny costumed beggars. Ten minutes after Dad and Eliza got home from work/daycare, we got our first set of trick-or-treaters – five kids from our neighborhood. Seems promising, right?

Wrong. Those five kids would end up being the only trick-or-treaters we got the entire night. Mom was disappointed, and Dad pretended to be as he wolfed down countless unclaimed Snickers, Twizzlers and Butterfingers.

Speaking of trick-or-treating, in the days leading up to Halloween, plenty of people asked Mom and Dad if they were planning on taking Eliza and me out. Mom and Dad’s response was that they were going to wait until their daughters could A) walk an entire trick-or-treating route without being carried, and B) say “trick or treat” without being prompted. Since neither one of us has fulfilled both of those goals yet, we stayed home. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t get to wear costumes!

I’ve heard that Mom and Eliza set the bar pretty high last year, so we didn’t even try beating that. In the end, Mom, Eliza and I chose to go with another group-themed costume: Me as the peapod...

Eliza as a carrot (in a costume handmade by our Ya-Ya!)...

and Mom as a chef.

Apparently we impressed a few people, because Eliza and I took home the “Cutest Baby Costume” award at the Halloween party we went to on Saturday night. It came as a bit of a shock, considering Eliza decided she didn’t want to wear the hat from her costume for more than 3 seconds at a time. See that photo up at the top of the screen? That’s literally the best photo of the two of us together in our costumes.

Still, it was nice to see that Ya-Ya’s hard work in making Eliza’s costume was properly appreciated, as was Mom’s effort in putting me in the same used costume that my sister wore two years ago.

Meanwhile, Dad also got into the costume spirit, but he chose partner up with my Uncle Ben, and they went as Wreck-It Ralph and Fix-It Felix. At first I was offended and assumed that he thought he was too cool to take part in our family theme, but then I realized that a man carrying around a toy hammer has probably never thought he was too cool for anything.