I love Halloween and it’s almost even more fun with my kids than it was before they were around. We are lucky to live in a great neighborhood for trick-or-treating (good sidewalks and streetlights, lots of houses who participate, lots of families and groups roaming the streets). The past couple of years, we’ve walked around with a couple of families from our street who we’re friends with (they’ve got kids around the same age as ours) and it makes for such a fun group outing. We meet for a quick drink beforehand (and/or bring one for the road), the kids toddle up the lawns together to ring the bells, and the grown ups chat and laugh and admire the perfect crescent moon.

The week beforehand, my weather app was predicting a high temperature of 72 and rainy, which, frankly, is the absolute worst weather, so I was hoping it was wrong. It was right — but! the way that manifested was that the high temperature of 72 was at, like, 6:00 AM and it just got colder and colder from there. The rain stopped in the middle of the afternoon and we were left with about 48 and overcast for the evening. It was perfection.

The funniest thing was that on the NextDoor app, we had people posting to ask whether anyone was still going to be going out on account of the “bad weather.” Can you even?! Fortunately, questions like that were met with replies like, “I hope so, because we have a ton of candy over at [1234 Chocolate Ave.]!” In the end, it did seem like fewer groups were out this year, but we still had a ton of fun.

They had worn skeleton pajamas and masks to school, where they encourage the kids to dress up, but we saved their real costumes for the main event. (School gets messy, y’all.) E&L dressed as a “llamacorn” and a chameleon, respectively, because I picked the two cutest/funniest fleece costumes that Target had in their sizes. Luckily for me, they loved them and the chameleon proved to be a big hit with all the other trick-or-treaters who were dressed as lizards, dinosaurs, or dragons. One of the moms passing out candy was dressed as a dragon and even asked to take a picture with him.

And just because these are some of my all-time favorite photos of them, I’ll share a Halloween retrospective: