Geisha Cannibals

I've never been much into Halloween, but you can trust me when I say that last year's Halloween totally sucked. Last year, Kathy and I were all excited to dress up our little one-year old girls on their first real Halloween. Kathy bought these lion and chicken costumes for them that were a-DOR-able. And then we put them in the costumes and Riley hated her costume with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. Riley started screaming bloody murder, but we took them out for a tour of the neighborhood Halloween festivities figuring that, hey, she would eventually forget about her costume and turn back into her normal happy self. But no, Riley did not forget, not even after an hour of walking through the crazy Fair Oaks Street parade of Halloween revelry, and at the end of the night, Riley was one pissed-off, over-stimulated mess of humanity. Leah meanwhile spent the entire evening sucking her thumb, staring in wide-eyed confusion at the chaos surrounding her.

So I wasn't really looking forward to this Halloween all that much. Fortunately, this Halloween was a solid improvement over last year's. I still think that our girls spent most of the night confused about what the hell was going on and why the heck all these adults were dressed up so weird, but at least they weren't screaming bloody murder at the same time. Upgrade, I say.

Although when Leah passed by the dude dressed up as a lobster in front of Whole Foods, she totally buried her head into her mommy's shoulder and made whimpery panicky noises until lobster-dude was out of sight. Apparently, our daughter's fine with witches and skeletons and demons and ghosts roaming the streets of Noe Valley but becomes terrified when confronted with a yummy crustacean. Go figure.

Our girls haven't eaten candy yet in their lives, and we weren't about to start them on it now, so really, from their standpoint, what was the point of the whole thing? I mean, honestly, when I was a kid I wouldn't have been too psyched about the whole dressing up thing if the chock-full bag of candy didn't come as part of the deal. Fortunately, Riley and Leah had no idea what they were missing, so they were happy as clams even as all the kids around them were scarfing candy like there was no tomorrow. And then somebody in front of one of the shops gave Riley a purple pencil, and man she just thought that pencil kicked ass. She spent the next hour walking around, happily clutching that purple pencil in her tiny little fist, occasionally holding it a aloft like a magic wand. Good stuff.

And now, the obligatory Halloween aren't-they-cute-costume pictures! Yee-ha!