Elliot Thomas Quong-Charles

Now that Elliot is at an age where Halloween has some meaning for him, it’s becoming really fun for all of us.  After a lot of indecision on Elliot’s part about what to wear (pirate, parrott, ghost, cookie, and m&m were all candidates), mama gave in and bought a cheap-o skeleton costume at CVS.  While I really wanted to make him something homemade, I realized that the likelyhood of him not wanting to wear anything at all was very high, and putting too much energy into the project was not worth it.  Luckily, he was really into being a skeleton….and a precious skeleton he was!

For the third year in a row now we have spent the early part of Halloween evening with our friend Emil who was born on Halloween in 2006.  We got Elliot all dressed up and did our best as lame-o parents to get in the spirit as well.  Once we were all in the car Elliot fell asleep during the ten minute drive to Emil’s house!  Luckily he awoke in time to partake in the pinata, an awesome dinosaur cake, and most importantly, the Bounce House!  For those of you who don’t know it, there is broad consensus among those ages two to twelve that a bounce house is key to an excellent birthday party.

After over-staying our welcome at Emil’s we headed over to our friend Deb Lykin’s house in Travis Heights.  Deb photographs trick or treaters in her neighborhood and makes prints of the photos for their parents.  You may remember Deb’s photos from last year were featured in Austin People’s Gallery at City Hall and Elliot debuted as a giraffe.  Although he was a little more reluctact this year, Elliot eventually stood in front the camera and made his scary faces.  Bribing him with Nerds (which he ate one-by-one) helped a lot.

Travis Heights is one of the Austin neighborhoods that gets really into Halloween.  Many of the residents there dress up their houses and create an experience for trick or treaters.  We hit up the best ones where we could hang out in makeshift graveyards, pick candy out of smoking cauldrons, and navigate around oversized glowing spiders in their webs.  Elliot got the knack of saying “Trick or Treat!” and also politely thanking the people giving him treats.  Once his little bucket was filled up we packed it in and drove home with Elliot waving a glow stick in the back seat and recounting to us with delight all the scary, creepy things he saw that night.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 9:53 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.