Halloween '14

I didn't get a lot of Halloween pictures this year (have I ever?), but here are a token few. Sam was a train engineer. As we recently learned from The Locomotive, a totally amazing and beautiful book, the engineer drives the train and the conductor collects tickets and manages the crew. Maybe that was obvious, but it was news to me. Anyway, I was happy with the practicality of the outfit (perhaps all costumes should be career-themed?) Sam already uses his engineer hat when building with Brio trains, but the overalls were new and novel to him. Kyle took Sam out along with our next-door neighbors.

I had what seemed like a great last-minute idea for Elsa: Parisian Artist, but the major set back was having too many props for a 16-month old. She was not stoked about wearing a hat in the house, or a necklace around her neck, nor holding both a paint palate and a paint brush.

Don't worry, though, I will definitely try this one again. Because, seriously, how great would it be to have a little Mary Cassatt for Halloween?

If you happened to notice the jar of bouillon and the bottle of agave on the step next to Elsa, you should know that these are objects that are part of her daily routine. She enjoys opening the spice drawers in the kitchen. There are two, packed with a variety of food products and these are among her favorite. She likes to walk them over to the step and collect them there. Occasionally, she pretends to take a big swig of the agave, and who can blame her?

Anyway, the Parisian Artist costume quickly dissolved and instead, Sam picked up the palate and brush and decided to "paint" things. In this picture, he is "painting Elsa's shirt black."

In hindsight, she did ditch the palate for the camera. 

So, maybe she's just more Leibovitz than Cassatt.

We walked around the neighboring houses pre-Trick-or-treating to see the decorations. It was really tricky trying to explain to a 4 year old why this particular one was supposed to be amusing. Discussing the disposal of dead bodies, cemeteries, grave stones, and how, "no bodies don't come back up out of the ground, that's why this is so funny" was surprisingly something I had not anticipated.

Though as Kyle mentioned, that's a little bit why we have Halloween in the first place, right, to honor and discuss the dead. Hmm, maybe we'll have to take a walk over to the cemetary soon...