October 31

The great candy experiment:: Leave a very large, full bowl of assorted candy on your front porch. Leave porch light on and vacate the premises. Come home two hours later and report on results.

Our neighborhood is usually pretty quiet on halloween with just a few of the neighbors kids transversing the streets. Because of our fun block party the weekend before, we had accumulated a large amount of candy that I didn't want in the house any longer. :) After deciding that this year, we would go out with the girls for a fun project, we decided to just leave the bowl of candy on the porch and hope it was gone when we came back. We both underestimated the nature of children as we predicted to each other that it would probably barely be touched as the number of children that ring the doorbell is usually not very many. Of course, the bowl was stripped clean and now we'll always wonder which child got the jackpot that night. Too bad we didn't have surveillance cameras to record the action.

Meanwhile, because we had already had the block party, the girls didn't miss the dressing up, and they were excited about going out. We grabbed a couple pizzas and reminded ourselves that even though the sun is shining, it's still October in CO and got a little chilly playing at the park. After we buckled everyone back in, we announced that we were going on a shopping excursion to fill up shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child. In the past couple years, we have let each girl have a box and choose which age category they would like to buy for. This year, Charlotte chose a girl her age, Ella chose a girl in her age category and Madelyn chose a boy from the oldest category. They were so happy perusing the dollar store aisles as we loaded our cart with coloring books, soap, toothbrushes, stickers, hair clips, and candy. And because of the night we chose to shop, the store was completely empty except for us. The next morning, Maddie straight away laid out all the items, we split everything up in piles and filled up those shoeboxes. This year, we're going to register our boxes online and hopefully follow their journey (as Charlotte and Ella were disappointed in not being the appointed deliverers of the gifts!) We had such fun that last day of October, I think we might have a new tradition.