Happy Halloween!

My little tootsie roll

Emerson sucking on his tootsie roll. I didn't give it to him to eat, but I let him hold it for the picture and then got distracted by trick-or-treaters and he went to town drooling on it and dissolving the wrapper. He cried when I took it away...it tasted so good!

Doing a scary face

Helping mom pass out candy to trick-or-treaters

Emerson and his "cousin" Taylee. Candice and I decided that since neither of us have family in Ohio, we'd just create our own here to supplement.

Halloween is my favorite holiday...after Christmas of course. I don't know what it is about it, but I just love it. I'm always a little disappointed with Halloween as an adult though because I remember it being just awesome as a kid. We'd have the fun parties at school that the room mothers would put together and we'd get to play games, touch gross stuff, and decorate sugar cookies. We'd have the traditional Halloween dinner, and then my dad would always take us trick-or-treating. It was always so dang cold, and I hated wearing my coat over my costume because it totally ruined the effect, but every year my mom made me. (Love you, mom! And I'm sure I'll do the same thing to my kids.) Then we'd always visit the grandmas when it was either really early or too late to do regular trick-or-treating. They always had the best candy, and Grandma Johnson always had something extra special for us.

Halloween is a little different here in Columbus. The city assigns each area a specific night and time to do trick-or-treating. And they don't even call it trick-or-treating....they call it Beggar's Night. (What?) So pretty much everyone in our ward lives in Hilliard, and their assigned time was the 30th from 6-8 p.m. And we technically live in the Columbus area, so our time was on actual Halloween from 6-8. They also don't ring doorbells. If you are participating then you sit on your porch to pass out candy. Man, talk about efficient. Just think about all the extra houses I could've hit as a kid without ringing the doorbell and waiting for the people to answer the door! Maybe I'm weird, but I made every kid say trick-or-treat when they walked up to me and opened their candy receptacles. Especially the teenagers. I picked out the hard candy to give to them. Hee Hee. I just figured that since they don't even have to ring a doorbell, the least they could do is say the words. We didn't take E trick-or-treating for real, but we took him around to a few ward members' houses mostly just to show off his cute costume (which I did not make...). Ben went to the McCain rally that night, so he missed most of the trick-or-treating stuff :(. We finished out the night with a Little Caesar's pizza and an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I wish I could tell you how it went, but I fell asleep. This Halloween was pretty good, but I can't wait until next year when we can take Emerson trick-or-treating....or begging....or whatever you want to call it.