Maia’s third Halloween has come and gone. Grandma Becky made a truly beautiful princess dress for her (thank you!).  Valerie carved up the pumpkins and set them out to invite fellow trick-r-treaters to pay a visit and take some goodies away.

Maia professed that “it’s the pumpkins’ birthday today” once the candles were placed inside.

Maia’s friend Ellen came over to help canvas the neighborhood and extract the treats from the willing participants. Here they are at our neighbor’s house, sheepishly hoping for candy. Later they got more into it and the two of them would go running up and knock on the door.

The next morning, Maia quietly got herself out of bed, scooted the stair-step stool over to the counter and fetched her bucket of candy from the counter. Valerie and I listened from our bedroom as she rustled through candy and giggled with glee and jumped up and down with excitement at the though of ALL OF THAT CANDY!

Finally, she opened our door, stuck her head through and just shy of yelled, “Good Morning!” with a huge Cheshire grin. She hauled her bucket up into bed and rifled through it.

She observed, “these chocolates have their shoes on so they can go trick-r-treating. The one on the left is sad because he’s hungry and doesn’t have any candy.”

She rifled around some more. “These chocolates are going to a party!”

I think her favorite “treat” she got was the rubber centipede. It was crawling around inside the bucket, but, it couldn’t eat the candy because of the wrappers.  Later, she decided to feed it some candy.

More pictures of the evening in the gallery.