Trick-or -Treaters in Training

I took a few minutes Saturday afternoon while we were waiting for Zilda to arrive, to ‘practice’ trick-or-treating with Sam and Pete.

Pete has never been trick-or-treating and didn’t even get to dress up for Halloween last year. Two years ago, Sam trick-or-treated at one house, Nanny’s, and last year…well, last year was a total bust. For his first Halloween, Sam did a successful turn as Curious George, accompanied by his father as the Man in the Yellow Hat. For his second Halloween, we asked Sam what he wanted to be for Halloween. Since the only word he could say at the time was “bus”, he was a bus. Elise and I hand-crafted a wearable bus costume with working lights.

Last year, Sam told us he wanted to be Thomas the Train. In our infinite enthusiasm, neither Elise or I thought we would have any trouble hand-crafting a wearable Thomas the Train costume, in much the same vein we had constructed the wearable bus costume. What both Elise and I failed to realize was that we were a thousand times busier than we had been the year before. I tried throwing the thing together during naps on Halloween day, but we had bit off more than we could chew. There was no way I was going to get it done. A friend kindly lent us an engineer’s outfit for Sam to wear. Since I blocked most of the day out of my head, I can barely remember what Pete was. I vaguely remember Elise hot-gun-gluing cotton balls to a white onesie so Pete could be a lamb. The only reason I remember this is I remember picking up cotton balls all night from the gymnasium floor where we ended up celebrating Halloween and picking cotton balls out of Pete’s mouth later.

In order to avoid a repeat of last year, we ordered Pete and Sam costumes. They both wanted to be dinosaurs. I dreamed of crafting a T-Rex head out of chicken wire and paper mache, and, though we are not as crazed as we were last season, the fact of the matter is, I’m not that crafty. Elise got all the craftiness.

Sam’s costume has arrived via DPO and it looks AWESOME! I can’t wait for Petey’s to get here!

As both Sam and Pete are trick-or-treat novices, a little training was in order.

Both boys went outside and pretended to knock on the door. I pretended to be an unsuspecting old Brazilian lady. (I have no idea what would happen if we actually tried going trick-or-treating in our neighborhood as they don’t celebrate Halloween in Brazil.)

It took a couple of tries before Sam remembered to say “trick-or-treat”. Then, he skipped right over just “trick-or-treat” and went straight to “Happy trick-or-treat”. Probably the most polite mini-T-Tex you would ever meet.

Whenever I asked Sam what he was, he responded, “T-Rex of the ocean!” I’m not exactly sure where this comes from unless it is in one of his dinosaur books describing an elasmosaurus or ichthyosaurus as the T-Rex of the ocean.

Pete pretended to pick up bugs and give them to me every time I opened the door. I told him he had to wait to see if I would give him a treat first before he tricked me.

Then, we practiced with buckets. Elise had bought the boys orange plastic Jack-o-Lantern buckets for trick-or-treating. I handed the buckets to the boys and closed the door for more practice. Sam didn’t even get a chance to knock on the door, before Pete swung the bucket at the window as though he were trying to smash his way into the candy.

Finally, they just started running inside. Sam would knock on the door, I would answer, pretending to be the old lady at the door and they would just sprint by me, giggling wildly, running in circles in search of candy, as I was yelling, “Hey out of my house, you hooligans! Shoo! Shoo!”

This Friday, the boys will get to come to my office and trick-or-treat door to door in the building. It should be very fun. Though I’m hoping Pete doesn’t clock my boss or the Ambassador in the knee caps with a bucket full of candy. :)