I love Halloween with little kids. When Nathan and I first moved into our neighborhood, we were the youngest people in the neighborhood by at least ten, but probably close to 15 years. Our very first Halloween, I was so excited to have trick-or-treaters in a real neighborhood! And we had about 5 total trick-or-treaters. But slowly, our neighborhood has turned over in the past five years. Younger families have moved in that have kids around our age or are in elementary school, and it’s so fun seeing the neighborhood alive with kids on Halloween night running from house to house!

We started our Halloween at the boys’ daycare trunk-or-treat. They were so excited to wear their costumes for the first time and see their friends from school!

On Sunday, we went over to my sister’s house for our annual Halloween cousin carnival! It’s a tradition born out of COVID when we couldn’t go trick-or-treating.

Each year, we do some of the same games and add in some new ones to keep it fun and interesting, particularly for the big kids!

This year we planned:

• A cake walk. Nothing like starting your holiday off with cake before dinner
• Fishing for prizes for the little kids
• Toilet paper mummy race for the big kids
• And spooky feels….that’s my sister’s name for the game. Because we had no idea what the game was called where you’d feel gross part of the monster. Like cooked spaghetti as the veins, peeled grapes as the monster eyeballs, and dried apricots as ears. I vividly remember as a kid being completely disgusted and traumatized by the eyeballs.

The kids had so much fun!

Live picture of two cheaters in action above during the cake walk.

Everybody won the cake walk and got a cupcake….or two. 🙂

The kids could barely stand now knowing what they were touching inside the monster. 🙂 Speaking of which….how cute is this monster board that my sister made?

After all of the games, everyone was starving, so we hung out and ate pizza. And just when it was time to carve pumpkins, the children disappeared to go play and let the adults handle their pumpkin carving….

I give you the pumpkin carvers and their masterpieces…

For Halloween day, the boys had their daycare costume parade, and then we went trick-or-treating with our neighbors in our neighborhood. I couldn’t even keep up with Harrison, he was sprinting from house to house determined to get the most candy possible! And Baby J wasn’t far behind him!

Now that I’ve fully memorialized Halloween 2022, we can now proceed to eat turkey and deck the halls!