Halloween 2009

This year, Halloween happened to be on a Saturday, which happened to be a home game for University of Oregon, which happened to be at the time one of the biggest games of the year against USC. James's best friend Jim and his wife Stephanie have two children around the same ages as our kids and decided to come down for the game (they are the biggest USC fans that I know). When it was announced that that game was going to be played at 5pm, my heart broke. We had already planned on taking the 4 children to the game, but we knew that there was no way the kids were going to be able to do traditional trick or treating in the neighborhood. Fortunately, we did have a lot of friends that were also going to be taking their children to the game and decided to do a trunk or treating at all the tailgates. We had no idea if anybody else was going to be bringing candy so we took it upon ourselves to buy a bunch of candy and each have it at our tailgate spots so that all the kids would have at least a few places to hit during tailgate time. Oh my, was I off on my assumption. Every single person who tailgated had brought candy for the kids, and I swear that our group of kids was the only group to do trick or treating and we were MOBBED. It was like a G Rated Mardi Gras with people yelling "Show Us Your Kids". Every person had bought a ton of candy not knowing how many kids would be out and we were attacked. Each person was giving handfuls, that's right, handfuls of candy to all the trick or treaters that came by (I am to assume it was so that they did not have to go home with a bunch of candy that they bought for the game. That, or the fact that everybody seemed to have started drinking at 5am in the hope that they would appear on GAMEDAY on ESPN. By 3pm, the kids could no longer hold their bags as it was too heavy for them to trek around. At 3:30 a friend of ours brought out bags from the University of Oregon filled with Costco sized candy to each kid that was in our group. By the beginning of the game, even James and I could no longer carry the candy we had so much. There was pounds of it, and I am not exaggerating, pounds of candy that we took home. It was a successful day for Oregon with the win over USC (though our friends would probably say differently), but a great weekend. In our group we had Nancy Drew, a Power Puff girl and two fireman.