Last week was Gabriel's first Halloween in costume. He selected a rocket-ship costume at Target. A great selection because it matches his recent (well, a few months ago) interest in the space shuttle and NASA more generally. Ran around shouting "3-2-1 blastoff!" about as discreetly as one could hope for from a three-year-old, and mostly just seemed pleased to be wearing the costume.In the attached picture, he's checking out the pace of construction at a construction site down the alley from our house-- an 8-story condo building scheduled for completion next summer. We've been stopping by every other day for the last few months.
On Halloween itself, we went to 4 neighborhood houses of folks that we knew, trying to reinforce a completely erroneous view of what kids do on that night. (That is, I want him to think that we visit a few friends and exchange gifts, not that he's meant to grab a garbage bag and demand loot from every house within a square mile.) He seemed pleased with the take, which was maybe 6 pieces of candy, and has been working his way through it at the rate of one piece a day. The crisis would be completely past but for the fact that we've got a mess of leftover Halloween candy of our own left over that didn't get distributed that night.
Our experience in handing out candy this year was very similar to past years-- starting at 6 PM, a trickle of young kids, usually in costume, accompanied by parents, and then a wave of older kids starting at 8 PM or so, usually with no costume and usually ignoring our instructions to limit themselves to two candies.
I may be imagining it, but it sure seems to me that you can see a behavioral difference even after one piece of candy. G seems more hyper, a bit less rational, and definitely less ready to be in bed at the scheduled 8-o-clock time. So we'll be happy when the candy season ends.
