Halloween and Other Good Times

We had a great Halloween weekend! Both Saturday and Sunday were just beautiful; temperatures in the 50s and sun sun sun! We got everyone outside Saturday afternoon to rake leaves and do some fall lawn clean-up. I love cleaning up the yard in the fall, getting everything cut down and "put to bed" for winter. And then I love it when all the new flowers bloom in the spring. Now, if someone could just tell me the secret to keeping motivated to do all the maintenance work from mid-June to mid-September!

Anyway, back to our weekend. After raking leaves we headed inside to carve our pumpkins! Lin jumped right in without hesitation, drawing the face on her pumpkin and then carving it out. If you remember an earlier post, Lin is very confused as to why we're not eating the pumpkins, and she was still asking about it on Saturday. We told her, some people do, of course, but we're not planning on it (I've never cared for roasted pumpkin seeds...).

And then we headed out Sunday night for trick-or-treating! Ruby was a bat-ballerina and Lin was... well, the vampire teeth didn't work out, so Lin was just Lin-with-weird-makeup. She had a lot of fun with the makeup, especially seeing me and Dave getting all dolled-up as well (she made us promise that if she wore a costume, we would too). Dave was a zombie and I was... well, my vampire teeth didn't work out either, so I was just Lisa-with-weird-makeup.

We had a good time but overall, trick-or-treating was not quite the glorious experience I wanted it to be, unfortunately. After all the build-up and excitement from the last several weeks, Ruby decided to clam-up and be shy, pretty much refusing to let go of our hands or legs the whole time and barely able to whisper "trick or treat". Typical 3-year-old! And after about 3 houses, Lin decided that trick-or-treating was stupid and didn't want to do it anymore. Typical 13-year-old!

I was disappointed with her sudden switch in attitude and I told her, "This is Halloween! This is what Halloween is all about! It's a really big deal in America!" And finally she said to me (I'll paraphrase) "What if you were 13 years old and sent to live in China? And everyone was telling you that you had to do something but you didn't understand why, but everyone's telling you that it's a big deal in China and everyone in China is doing it. But you didn't understand it. How would you feel?"

Huh.

So I lightened-up on her, and then she lightened-up, and we all had a truly great time. I'll do a picture-post later today...