Four Part Harmony

Halloween turned out to be a pretty fun week for us here on 59th Street.

For starters, Anna got to wear her ladybug costume much of the week leading up to Wednesday, which she was pretty excited about.

The weather has continued to be clear and cool, and
so we spent quite a bit of time working out back in the yard. We also ran our errands out and about town in costume, which suited Anna just fine.

Here’s a shot of Anna and I with our pumpkins. Michael came into town from Astoria and stayed with us for a few days. We carved pumpkins after dinner on Wednesday night. Michael did the little one and I did the bigger one. Then we set out on a trick-or-treating excursion, and left Michael to deal with the coming onslaught of ghosts and spider-men.

We set off up the street and coached Anna in the finer points of trick-or-treating. She was unsure about it at first, but seemed to warm to the idea of people giving her things that she could put in her bag. Thankfully, she doesn’t really see candy around to much, and therefore she wasn’t too worried about eating any of it. She mostly just liked going from door to door and putting stuff in her bag.

We made a short loop around the ‘hood, probably went to about 15 houses.
We actually ended meeting a few different sets of neighbors that we had never seen before.
Ever.
Even though they live within 200 yards of our house.
A sad commentary on the state of society?
Or maybe we just keep different hours, who knows…
Either way it was nice to make that connection and feel a bit more of a neighborhood bond.

By the end Anna had it pretty well figured out. She would knock on the door, and hold out her bag or reach into the bowl, but wouldn’t go so far as to say “trick-or-treat”. Her hands were pretty full too by the end, as she was collecting leaves along the way. When it came time to pick her treat, she had to shuffle all the leaves to one hand, set her bag down, then try to fit the candy into the bag one handed.

Her “treat” bag sat in the living room for the next several days (actually, it’s still there), and Anna would play with it by taking everything out and putting everything back in over and over. She did get to eat a few pieces of her candy. Unfortunately we didn’t have the camera out to catch her big smile and eyes lighting up when she got that first taste of chocolate.

We’ve got some more photos from the rest of the week, and this past weekend.
I’ll put them up if I get a chance in the next couple of days.