Halloween, Part 2

I love that Halloween is one of those holidays that is always just as fun as the preliminary festivities.  This year was no exception.  The big kids wore their costumes to school,

and Eliza and I attended Jack's class party.

The class sang several Halloween songs they'd been working on.
As you can tell, Jack was an enthusiastic singer!

Jack with his teacher, Mrs. Anita, whom we LOVE. 

After the musical presentation, the parents sat in a circle with the treats they brought,
and the kids trick-or-treated around the circle.

"You mean I get to eat candy on the way to picking Cat up from school? Awesome." 

We had two friends whose husbands were out of town on Halloween, so we invited the wives and kids over for dinner and trick-or-treating.  For dinner I tried two new things - first, I made my favorite (bread machine) roll recipe, but made them look like pumpkins.  I didn't use nearly enough food coloring when I made the dough, then I tried to knead in more food coloring, which took forever and was a lot of work, and they baked up almost orange.  I'll probably pour in the whole dropper next year (or I guess it would be half of the red and half of the yellow).  The second new thing was cooking dinner inside a pumpkin.  I used this recipe, and was completely surprised relieved that it was actually very good.  The kids even liked it!  Because the inside of the pumpkin cooks with the rest of the dish, you scoop it out with the rice and meat mixture, which is awesome.  The leftovers were even good.  I believe we've found ourselves a new Halloween dinner.  :-)

Pumpkin Rolls

Halloween dinner!

Even though we had our first snow of the season less than a week before Halloween,

it had warmed up enough by the big day that we didn't even need jackets.  I was comfortable in my jeans and sweatshirt and Cat was in short sleeves the whole evening.  We can handle that kind of Halloween - much more like home.  So once we finished dinner and got everyone's costumes on, we headed out, happily sans coats.

All the kids ready to go trick-or-treating.

Cat the Cat.

I love Jack the Jack-o-Lantern in this picture.

Eliza probably would have been happy to stop after just a few minutes, haha.
Lollipop?  Check.

 

Cat with her Primary teacher from 2011,
dubbed the Best Primary Teacher Ever.

 

The three trick-or-treating families.
Somehow we managed to circle the whole neighborhood with 9 kids and four adults, and nobody got lost. 

The final tally: LOTS of candy.
We took a few minutes to swap with friends before they headed out.

This was another fun Halloween.

I don't mind frivolous holidays one bit....

and I don't think my kids do, either.