Halloween in the City!

I figured that since Thanksgiving has now come and gone, it is high time that I post some pictures of our Superhero buddies and their Halloween adventures!!! I must warn you, this is a long post... but it includes pictures! Finally!

Eli LOVES Halloween, so I was feeling a lot of pressure to deliver a super-fun halloween extravaganza here in the city so that he would not miss the fun of past years in Austin as much... As it was, I felt like there were a lot of unknowns surrounding this holiday in particular - knowing trick-or-treating in our upper east side neighborhood was bound to look differently than the WB, but not really knowing what it would look like...

Apparantly there are some streets in our neighborhood lined with brownstones that host trick or treaters, but they are flooded with people (and lots of stairs). We also heard that some apartment buildings have sign-ups for the residents who want to have kids from that building trick-or-treat at their doors, but our apartment has no real central messaging center (and it's filled with non-families anyway), so we assumed that nothing was going on at our place. And, to top it off, Halloween fell on a Sunday this year, which is a "work day/night" for Logan so he would not be joining us for the festivities and I was a little nervous about trekking all over the city with the buddies by myself... Oh yeah, and it was supposed to be cold - so they were going to have to wear their heavy coats over their costumes, virtually canceling out their costume all together. And where were we going to carve our pumpkin? Where would we put that said pumpkin after it was carved?

I ended up finding all kinds of activities and events around the city on the website: mommypoppins.com, and put together a schedule of events from Thurs-Sun of going to parks and parties and parades and all that fun stuff. Some things were worthwhile (like the pumpkin festival in CP) and others were not (the party in John Jay park- the biggest attraction was throwing a rubber chicken through a hoop for twizzlers... what...), but I figured we might as well check it all out so we knew what we would want to do again in the future!

Here they are in all their glory...

Eli throwing the rubber chicken through the hoop...

Yes, our stroller seats 3 super heros at once! And conveniently houses their weapons!

Here kids are eating the most delightful quesadillas from a street vendor at the Pumpkin Festival in Central Park - SO delicious... especially because good tex-mex quite hard to find...

Just in case you did not already know, the boys were Spiderman and Batman for Halloween :). They had already been wearing their costumes at least once a day for the entire month preceeding the big day, but I would usually restrict the costumes to the apartment use only. They were more than excited to finally show them off outside, and had an instant bond with any other toddler/young child in a superhero costume. They and the other child would yell at each other from across the block, or the park, "hey, Ironman!" "hey, Flash!" "hey spiderman!" and then pretend to fly off or to jump kick an imaginary bad-guy or something else super-hero-ish... One of the most fun things about having kids in the city is that they don't have the "social graces" yet to know that you are supposed to be discrete and ignore other people.

(our new friend, Ironman who we met at Central Park)

We also got invited by one of the families at the church to trick-or-treat at their building - which ended up being a blast! There were 5 families - 10 kids (7 walkers) - who were part of the party. We met up at the host's apartment at 5:00, where we got the list of apartments welcoming trick-or-treaters and then all traipsed through the halls and down the flights of stairs together, corralling kids and instructing them to "take just one piece of candy from the abandoned bowl" and "make sure you say thank you to the nice lady" and "no, you may not eat any of your spoils until we arrive back at the apartment" and other such common halloween rules that must be abided by in order to have a grand ol' time. We were done visiting all the apartments by 5:45ish, at which point we all rendezvoused back at the host's apartment for the cider and snacks, where the children were allowed one piece of candy to eat while sitting politely at the table, thank you very much. We all chatted and played around for a while, and we all left in time for a peaceful bedtime routine to be accomplished. I was home by 6:30 - even after leaving my phone at the apartment and having to go back for it!

Eli, and friends, enjoying being squished into the elevator all together...

Trick or Treat!!!

From top Left: Cory Vassar (fairy), Wells Emerick (Viking), Kate Sullivan (snow white)

Cooper Schleef (fireman), Judson Vassar (spiderman), Eli (spiderman), and Cal (batman)

The boys LOVED it. It was perfect for their little legs to not have to walk for blocks and blocks up and down stairs and in and out of strollers, and for them not to have to wear heavy coats, and for them to all be together! We really enjoyed being with the other families and sharing the experience together, and we procured the perfect amount of candy :).

I, however, did feel slightly like a red-neck at the end of the night remembering fondly the craziness of trick-or-treating around the WB and the rollicking festivities at the Casa de Lopez afterwards - which always included a carved watermelon and all the candy you could stuff in the kids mouths and the inevitable crash on the couch by 10:30 ish (if the kids had not suffered a complete melt down prior to that...) and the free flowing root beer and the adults in costume and the occasional stray dog or two (or was the 4th of July?) and on and on... I was only consoled by the fact that the Austin party was pared down this year, and by the fact that, oh yeah, I get to live in what I think is the coolest city in the world... but I really really missed you guys deeply and acutely!

So after we got home, I let the boys have a few more pieces of candy and let them stay up late to hang out with me and play... don't tell my new friends here in the city...