The Passineau Family: Pittsburgh Edition: Our Halloween

Our Halloween began with the girls waking up to find that the Great Pumpkin had left them some goodies. When I was a kid this was a tradition at our house, so thankfully, Michael went along with it & the girls got to have this also. As I explained to the girls, the Great Pumpkin only brings small gifts, unlike Santa, because he really doesn't have any where to store all the gifts that he brings....he has no bag or sled. So I think they had realistic expectations, although that didn't keep Jessica from asking for large gifts :) This year they received a Melissa & Doug bracelet making set, a mess free activity book, play dough, & the obligatory Reeses Pieces with decorative pumpkin candy holder. Then, because Jessica had been so excited about the fake spider webs you see everywhere, I made sure their pumpkin buckets where covered with webs & that the "Great Pumpkin" left some webs in the entry way. In all honesty, we could have given them a bag of fake spider webs & let them play with that all day, they loved it! Nonetheless, the bracelet maker & the activity books kept them quite content yesterday on our rainy Halloween. For breakfast, I made them monster waffles, super easy & cute, the girls loved them, then they also had a bowl of eyes (grapes) to accompany their breakfast :) Later in the afternoon once we had made all 8 bracelets, played with spider webs, & done a fair amount of their activity books they decided to turn my laundry hamper into a pirate ship, we also made binoculars from toilet paper rolls, they played Jake & the Neverland Pirates (for those of you not familiar with this show, it's really cute & there is a girl pirate named Izzy that the girls love) for over an hour before it was time for some quiet time in the playroom. Of course, quiet time for my girls is always relative, as they will not nap & are mostly loud while they "rest" in the playroom, although it does give me time to do chores & get dinner started. At four o'clock I knew it was going to be a lousy night for behavior, when both girls had a meltdown....uggh! What do you do at that point, you've promised them to trick or treat, but you know things are not going to go all that well?? Once daddy was home & everyone had eaten, we had some behavior issues before trick or treat, which nearly cost them their chance...I realize this may sound harsh, but they were already exhausted before we headed out. The weather...oh the weather....it was a horrible night to try to trick or treat! It was thankfully warm, but drizzly & rainy the entire time we were out. The girls got dressed after more behavior issues concerning what they would wear & then thankfully seemed to rally once we were on our way to trick or treat in our neighborhood. I will say folks were very generous with candy due to the horrible weather, so the girls got a ton of great stuff. We also got some rather different types of treats, one man was giving out soda to the kids & beers to the adults...ok! The girls also got a ton of individual bags of chips/pretzels. We all returned home after about no more than 10 houses---drenched. By that point both girls were complaining of how cold they were. I hope they don't get sick. All in all they did have a great time & the rain didn't really seem to bother them. I didn't get any pictures of them doing their thing b/c of the rainy weather..not a good night to take a camera (sorry grandparents). They both were great about saying trick or treat & also thank you, which was a big change over last year. Here's to next year when we will hopefully have better weather & behavior. Hope everyone reading had a great time with their kiddos!