Trick or Treat

We considered dressing Jack up as Elvis (he's got the hair for it), but we decided to stick with something he could relate to. The boy has an abiding love for choochoos. In a rare show of artistic and engineering fervor, Daddy constructed Thomas the Tank Engine by mounting one of our old moving boxes onto the very same Radio Flyer wagon he had when he was a little guy 30 years ago. Daddy was just as surprised as Mama that it came out so well. After Mama acquired a conductor outfit, Jack was pretty much a happy boy. We suspect that this is one costume that will outlast Halloween by quite a bit.

Jack trick-or-treated at a grand total of 4 houses and had a fine time. He even said "thank you" -- which is something we've been working on recently with less than complete success. Once we got back home, he had great fun moving our give-away candy back and forth from vessel to vessel. (There were over 300 pieces of candy to move, so this game kept him busy a good long time.) Occasionally he would stop to say, "Happy Halloween!" or "Bye Bye Superman!"

Kudos to Mom for the well-rendered Thomas face!
Jack loves his train/wagon........

....but does he love it more than Daddy?

thanks to our neighbor for giving Jack his very first Halloween candy.

At the going rate of 40 cents a pound...

...Jack is about a ten dollar pumpkin.

Last weekend we took him to the pumpkin patch in the costume he wore for his first Halloween. Surprisingly, we were the only ones that day who dressed our kid up like a pumpkin. Many times we heard "Aaaaww! I'll take that one!" or "What a cuuuuute little pumpkin girl!" (We don't take offense to the little girl comments; he is pretty cute after all.)

Jack really enjoyed himself (as did Mama, Daddy, Papaw, and Mae Mae). He doesn't 'get' Halloween, but he has noticed that pumpkins seem to be everywhere lately. He also recently starting getting his colors straight, so every chance to point out 'orange pumpkin' is pretty cool in his book. Jack got to ride a cow train, follow a tractor on a hay ride, and sit on many different pumpkins.

The fun of the last might merit a little explanation: Jack does two maybe-more-weird-than-average things: 1) recently he has been experimenting with carrying various things with his neck, and 2) for a long time now he has enjoyed experimenting with whether or not something can be sat upon. The pumpkin patch was evidently a place where Number 2 was a fine, fine game.

Here are several pics...our faves from both last year (pre-blog and MONTHS pre-first-haircut) and this year so you can see how much he's changed. It's strange to look at the older pictures...in my mind's eye he never had that chubby a baby face. He's certainly a skinny kid now. He's got the baby belly, but his waist keeps him in 9-12 month pants. As a matter of fact, he still wears the pants he wore in last year's pumpkin patch pictures. They're like baby capris now, but we just can't keep much bigger pants on him!