Julia and Joseph have declared Halloween their second-favorite holiday after, of course, Christmas. Their love for holidays seems to be proportional to the total mass of the the stuff they receive in observance of the date. By this metric, Flag Day seems to be a big loser: school is usually out by the time mid-June rolls around, so they don’t even get cookies at a class party.

This year, the kids decided they had to get their pumpkin at the pop-up pumpkin “patch” in the parking lot of the light-rail station near our house. I tried in vain to convince them of the advantages of some of the more authentic alternatives—corn mazes, bunnies, working trains, etc.—but they were unmoved. The allure of the giant, inflatable shark slide they saw from the car was too much to resist.

Incidentally, the night before our trip to the pumpkin lot, we had dinner at the very same parking facility. There’s a local company, Moveable Feast, that brings together food trucks from around the area on nights and weekends. Joe, Julia and I had pretty traditional food truck fare: burritos and hot dogs. Julie, on the other hand, went all-out with a bacon cheeseburger that featured two halves of a glazed donut in place of a bun. It was a welcome change of pace—there were a ton of interesting options—and a unique experience (not to mention a convenient way for the food truck operators to make a bit of extra money outside their normal peak hours). Julie has almost fully recovered.

We picked up the pumpkin on Saturday, but didn’t get a chance to carve it until Wednesday afternoon, the day of Halloween. Julia was working on her Pitcher Pressure book report all day Sunday, and the kids were tied up with activities and errands Monday and Tuesday. With Spanish class, soccer practice and Julia’s science class, their days are far more fully booked than I remember mine being when I was either of their ages.

Scheduling concerns aside, the pumpkin did get carved, and the kids were ready for trick-or-treating by the time I made it home Wednesday night. Joe had planned to go as Spider-Man right up to the day the kids and Julie went shopping, when he changed his mind and decided he wanted to be Captain America. Julia originally thought she would re-use her Spider-Girl costume from last year, which would have conveniently allowed us to save a bit of money. Naturally, that impulse didn’t last—it never stood a chance, really—and she decided she would make up her mind at the costume store. Were she like me, this would have had the makings of a colossal disaster, but Julia found her outfit at the very first shop they visited. She elected to go as a candy corn witch, complete with a candy corn hat and a candy corn shirt. Julie even took her to get her nails done in the familiar candy corn pattern, an excursion which kept her out late on a school night, but everyone seems to have survived.

We have pictures, of course. There’s not much time to dwell on Halloween for now: the Toys ’R Us holiday catalog came in the mail yesterday, and the kids are busily circling the items they’d like Santa to bring for Christmas.