Trick or Treat!

Haven't forgot about Holdie hitting that two-year mark and have pics to post, but thought I would get the rest of our Halloween pics up since Halloween is so October 2012 and we are on to Thanksgiving! Well really more focused on a birthday party and a certain someone turning four this month.  wowsers.

Anyways, back to Halloween and the evening that it was.  Let me tell you, they don't mess around in the 'burbs.  In the city, Halloween is HUGE.  Like celebrating for days.  But huge not for the little ones, more for the big ones.  The actual day of Halloween is pretty impressive for little kids, because as far as cities go, Chicago still has a great neighborhood feel and a ton of little kids. But the 'burbs, it's serious stuff.  The decorations, the level of intensity, the "haunted" houses, the number of full size candy bars, the whole thing.

An exhausting and exciting evening for all of us.  Took me a couple days to recover.

Our pumpkins:

Holdie's hat was a bit of a "challenge".  I think his hair took up too much room in there and forced the hat over his eyes.  Poor guy could barely see.  I even tried bobby-pinning the hat to his hair (ha, don't tell him but had left over bobby pins from doing Avery's hair).  Didn't work.

happy about his hat situation.  clearly.

we tried!

Biggest pumpkin ever.  See below.  There were actually two of them.  

Now I didn't get many pics of the really crazy houses as it was too dark.  Sunset was like 5:30pm here and it seemed to get dark so soon.  I did attempt a couple pics at this one scary house.

First we were greeted by this sitting on a bench by the sidewalk:

I'm talking about that thing on the left - it was a woman.  She was creepily greeting people after pretending to be fake/dead.  Creeper McCreepy.

We made the dads venture into the porch area, which was completely covered with black drapes!

I would have been totally freaked out as a kid.  Eric said there were people dressed up and hiding in corners.  All sorts of weirdness.  Luckily, since we have little kiddos, all the scary houses were pretty tame for us.

One extreme house even had a bouncer-type guy who stood in the front and gave the code to his crew to let us go through unharmed.  We heard him say "little princesses coming through, let them go, let them go".  We saw the creepy werewolf and gross clowns waiting in the driveway for the next group of kids.  Totally intense!!

Aahh, but we made it back unscathed and maybe because she's too young, Avery wasn't even fazed by the scary houses.  I just kept reminding her that it was "pretend".

She was focused on getting the goods of course.

Late night, sugar overload.  A successful Halloween on all fronts.