Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year, and having a young son really revives the Halloween spirit in me. This is technically his fourth Halloween, and every year he gets a little bit better at it. He had multiple costumes this year, just like always. The one he picked out at Spirit Halloween was a monster truck from Hot Wheels named Bone Shaker.

He actually really loved wearing the costume at home, but the first real Halloween event I took him to was at the Haywood mall, and he decided he hated his costume, so I had to hold him for the majority of the time. That wasn’t very fun. My stepdaughter Lily was Glinda from The Wizard of Oz/Wicked.

We did a few Halloween events in October, but his little daycare put on a great Halloween day for them, and they even had a Halloween parade where we got to see all the kids in their costumes. Alexander loved it, but he did get a little confused because he had to stay with his class instead of running to me.

Our family costume was The Wizard of Oz this year. It was my stepdaughter’s choice because she loved Wicked so much. I actually played the Tin Man in a middle school play, so I knew who I wanted to be. I will admit I may have reminded Lily of the idea because I knew it would give my wife basically two options, Dorothy Gale or the Wicked Witch. And I figured she wouldn’t be too eager to put on all that green makeup. Let’s just say I was very happy with her costume choice, LOL.

We trick-or-treated in her dad’s neighborhood because it was a richer neighborhood than ours, and her dad had a golf cart we could ride as Jessica isn’t fully recovered from surgery. The kids had fun until the golf cart died, and it was pretty chaotic after that. Alex wasn’t very cooperative with walking this year while doing the traditional door-to-door trick-or-treating, so he was perfectly fine calling it quits. When we got back to her dad’s house, we let Lily get a few more houses in for the night, and she seemed to be mostly happy with it, though I did feel a little bad.