Happy Halloween

Sorry I'm a day late and I don't have men in kilts like Nicole or eye candy like Shawna - just a lowly pirate..or two..or three.

I'm sure I'll see lots of pirates tonight trick-or-treating and vampires and ghosts and ghouls and princesses and witches. I haven't dressed up for Halloween in a very long time. I think the last time I dressed up, I was a saloon girl with a big petticoat and fishnet stockings. I never did get too creative with my Halloween costumes. My kids are past the age where they want to buy a costume and be a Power Ranger or Batman. This year my younger son is going to be a "bloody In-N-Out worker." For those of you outside of Calif. In-N-Out is a very popular fast-food hamburger chain. Anyway, he's wearing a paper In-N-Out hat, a t-shirt with their logo, and he's going to bloody-up his face. My older son has decided he's going to be Michael Phelps. He wants to go out in a Speedo and eight (Judo) medals hanging around his neck. My husband and I plan to veto that costume...

In addition to trick-or-treating, we'll head over to a neighborhood haunted house. This haunted house is no walk in the park with a little wet spaghetti either. These folks put together an amazing and very scary haunted house, using their covered driveway and garage. One year they had an insane asylum, one year it was a haunted pirate ship, and last year it was a creepy circus, which is the worst for me because I hate clowns! They have live people jumping out at you around corners. Some of my boys' friends refuse to go inside.

So now that I have kids, Halloween is pretty much all about them. Our traditions center around carving pumpkins - we let the boys do their own this year with some interesting results, (my older son had his jack-o-lantern vomiting his insides - he's 12, enough said), going to our town's "Halloween Frolic" with games, costume contest, jumpers, food, and another haunted house, and then trick-or-treating at night.

What are your Halloween traditions? Have they changed over the years? Hmm, maybe I can get my husband to start a Halloween tradition of wearing pirate underwear...