Halloween

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Sophia has finally hit the age where everything is of great importance to her. Holidays have become huge events with weeks of anticipation beforehand. As of today, November 18th, she has Christmas fever and is greatly anticipating the arrival of Santa.

She did however have a great time for Halloween. I made sure to teach her how to be a polite little ladybug (Phoebe was a pirate and as such did not need to show the same level of decorum as a dainty ladybug). Here's Phoebe perfecting her AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!! replete with a clenched fist swinging in front of her chest to punctuate the exclamation.

In the run up to the actual day of Halloween we were able to participate in one of the most crowded events I've ever witnessed. The fire department of our nearby town has a complete miniature town where sponsors were able to erect Hobbit sized businesses so curious young citizens could practice obeying traffic laws in power wheels with an entire town sized to their own dimensions. This town is called safety town.

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Safety town opens to the public to allow trick or treaters to trick or treat in safety... or at least in a crowded miasma of more corporate sponsored candy giving in the hopes that we might sign up for junk mail on a whim. I am not opposed to the practice as it was a pretty good time. The wait was about an hour but the fine gentlemen of our local police and fire departments were doing their organizations a fine service by chatting with the little ones and even letting them climb on the fire trucks and figure out how to ring the bells on the front bumpers of the fire trucks (Sophia figured out how to ring the bell and finally had to be asked to quit because it was too loud).

I have to report a devastating loss at safety town. I lost one of Phoebe's blankets while we were there. If you were not aware each of my children has some attachment to a blanket. Sophia is not as attached as Phoebe is but even Sophia becomes concerned if her blanket is not with her at night. Phoebe however, is very very attached to the feel of her blankets.

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She slowly finds a "corner" and holds it in one of her hands as she rests her thumb in her mouth and rubs either her cheek or her nose with the corner. While at safety town I had draped her blanket over my shoulder. In the commotion of taking 1 photograph (it was pretty dark by then so I only got 1) and shuffling our children around I dropped the blanket and didn't realize I had dropped it for quite a while. Sadly her blanket was gone. It has been replaced by other blankets and happily Phoebe is able to swap them out... provided the blanket has a corner.

The following week Halloween actually arrived and we carved pumpkins. I then took the little ones out to go around the block and trick or treat. They did very well. They were polite (except for Phoebe who was able to announce the she was a PIRATE!! and yell AAAAAARRRRRRR after saying trick or treat at nearly every house. I believe this is actually polite for a pirate to announce themselves before shouting AAAARRRRRR). They got plenty of candy and they both discovered a love of Chocolate.

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