Happy Halloween

What a sugarfest!  We've had to peel the kids off the ceiling and tie them down to their beds to get them off their sugar highs these past two days.  Just kidding.  Kind of.

It's been party-city around here.  Z's preschool is too PC to observe ANY holidays (sad), but B's school had a costume parade on Friday.  We went from there to another costume parade at M's work, and from there to a family bowling night sponsored by B's school, where there was yet another costume parade.

On the big day itself, we went to a Halloween party at a neighbor's house, then I took the kids trick-or-treating while M rushed home to hand out candy to all three kids that rang our doorbell.  It was a beautiful night -- the best trick-or-treating weather I can remember since B was born.  There was a nearly-full moon, and the temperature was in the 50s.  Most neighbors even shoveled all that snow off their sidewalks for the kids!

B went as Luke Skywalker (of course), and Z was a chicken, thanks to Lisa, whose Emme wore this adorable chicken costume last year.  A friend of M's suggested he should've gone as Colonel Sanders.  He hangs out with some sickos.

In the past, we used to hold onto B's candy & dole it out 2-3 pieces a night, after a good dinner had been eaten.  Last year we decided to put him in charge, with a few ground rules like no candy before breakfast.  It was gone in about a week.  We decided to go with that again.  Think about it -- even if some of the candy mysteriously disappears overnight (which we couldn't pull over on B anymore -- he knows there are exactly 78 pieces of candy in that pumpkin), if you dole it out 2-3 pieces a night, you have Halloween candy in the house until Christmas, when new candy enters.  You dole that out, and next thing you know, it's Valentine's Day.  Then there's Easter (which everybody knows offers THE BEST CANDY OF THE YEAR!!!).  You end up with candy every night for six months.  That's a habit folks! 

So we laid out the four following ground rules.  Inside of these, the monkeys can consume as much candy as they want to, whenever (although the volume in Z's pumpkin is going to be mysteriously cut in half overnight tonight -- I'll be eating candy at work all week).  The rules are:

1. No candy between waking up & eating breakfast.
2. No candy during the hour before dinner.
3. No candy wrappers anywhere but the trash can.
4. Candy must be kept on a shelf inside the closet, with the door shut, when not being actively consumed (think of the damage Kenai could do with a 78 pieces of candy)