2005 was Noah’s third Halloween and, this year, he really seemed to get the concept. Noah was a race car driver this year. After losing a Harriet Miers-ish lobbying battle in 2003 for that costume, Noah’s conservative base finally got what it wanted today when he climbed into his little red and white jump suit for the first time. (For those of you interested in Noah trivia, he was a frog in 2003 and a bat in 2004.)
Halloween started off with a kid-friendly party at Ralph’s office. It took a decent amount of encouragement and outright bribery to get Noah into his costume. Only after a promise to visit the various fish tanks around the office and to seek out candy from Ralph’s co-workers did he finally agree. Of course, it was only a little while into the event that Noah demanded to wear his costume ‘five times’ and required the same bribery to get him to agree to take it off! The work party was very cute and Christy, as usual, outdid herself with the planning and preparation of food, treats for the kids and balloons. She also custom-made several of the kids’ costumes including Noah’s cousin Talia’s Strawberry Shortcake costume. Noah and Talia always look cute together, but especially so in their respective costumes…too cute!!
As darkness fell, we were all looking forward to going trick-or-treating with Noah around the neighborhood. Grandma and Grandpa stopped by which was a good thing because Noah requires a posse to go with him when trick-or-treating. He held his Daddy’s hand, demanded that Grandma held his bag and was stricken with sudden bouts of shyness as his candy was collected by his Grandma. He very politely said ‘trick-or-treat’, ‘Happy Halloween’ and ‘Thank you’ at each stop and ended up with a nice little pile of candy. This was a major improvement over last year’s trick-or-treating experience where we went to three stops, one of which involved giving all of his candy to our neighbors across the street!
The evening ended with a visit from Noah’s friend from school, Lauren. Noah has notified us several times that he intend to marry Lauren (although, he said that she has to go home aftwards). We took Noah and Lauren across the street to El Dorado Park where they were having a Halloween carnival complete with a jump house and games and activities for kids. It was a very cute event and Noah LOVED the bounce house. I kept joking that, toward the end, he looked like a heavyweight boxer in the late rounds, so tired that they can barely lift themselves off of the mat. Well, you do what it takes to get a good night’s sleep out of them and this year’s Halloween events, hopefully, did just that.
It was really fun to see Noah start to really understand some of what was going on and to enjoy it himself. After his initial rejection of his costume, he seemed to really like it and he did look very cute. It won’t be too many years before he just wants to be some sort of bloody monster and go out and steal candy from little kids, so we have to enjoy this while we can.