We had a super fun Halloween! First, my mom and dad are in town. My mom being here isn’t that unusual, but my dad being here is a rare occurrence. He’s not much of a traveler so we usually only get one visit out of him per city. Now that he’s retired we’re going to drag him out to visit us more often, but it was still a fun novelty to have both my parents here for Halloween—the first one they’ve spent with Annalie.

Second, Brenda invited us to come hang out with her crew so we went to the beach.

Trick-or-treating is always more fun with friends, don’t you think? If we’d stayed at home we probably would have gone to the mall and trick-or-treated with Gramaw and Grampaw. I guess that would have been fun in its own way. But when it comes to putting on costumes and begging candy from strangers, I’m a traditionalist. There’s just something about walking down a street at sunset, seeing all the decorations and jack-o-lanterns, ringing doorbells, having people say, “Ooh, aren’t you guys cute! Go ahead and take two, there’s plenty where that came from!” I don’t know if a mall experience could come close.

Hard as it may be to believe considering that Brenda has become one of my closest friends and now holds all the secrets to our house, Troy had not yet met Brenda’s husband Toby, her mom Sue, her sister-in-law Heather, or her nieces Rapunzel and Superchic (not their real names). And Brenda hadn’t met my dad yet, either. We all needed some context.

I’m a big believer in having context. I love to meet my friends’ parents, siblings, co-workers, or anyone from other parts of their lives, just to get another angle on understanding them. Erin is big on the context thing too, and when we visited her and Rocco recently she knew I’d want to see her office at school, meet her mother-in-law Rosie, eat at their favorite pizza joint, and so on. So now when she talks to me about going to Rosie’s house or her office mate Alison, I have mental pictures of what she’s talking about. Context is important.

By now Brenda and I have a decent amount of context on one another’s families. We’re just catching up the rest of our families on each other.

We got there early to beat the crazy California rush-hour traffic…so early that we had time to go to the beach! My mom grew up in California, just a couple of towns over from where Brenda grew up, actually—I originally got hooked on her blog because I recognized the mountains in some of her photos of the Sticks—and she loves the ocean. She will go to the beach at every available opportunity. That’s pretty much how Rapunzel feels about it too, so we all walked down to the beach.

Annalie has a funny relationship with the ocean. Some days she loves it, some days she’s petrified of it, and most days it’s a little of both. Luckily on Halloween with Gramaw and Grampaw there she was mostly okay. She even went climbing on the rocks by some tidepools with Troy and Rapunzel and Grampaw and had a fine old time.

Brenda and I had walked back to the house with Baby Bug and SuperChic by then. We had to make the Halloween-themed dinner. There were mummy hot dogs and zombie brownies. Heather brought fancy homemade caramel apples. There were also sweet-potato oven fries and salad, but those were just regular non-Halloween items.

After that it was finally the time the children had all been waiting for. Time to put on costumes and trick-or-treat, woohoo!

Annalie was so excited about her costume. She kept telling everyone that she was a Japanese girl, even though I kept trying to tell her that her dress was actually Chinese. But our friends who used to live in Japan had sent it to her, so as far as she was concerned it was Japanese. (I guess there’s no reason a Japanese girl couldn’t wear a Chinese dress.) What she was most excited about was that she got to wear some of my make-up. A little eyeliner, a little mascara and lip gloss, and voila! She’s ready to give Daddy a heart attack at suddenly looking like a teenager.

She was also quite happy that she at last owned a parasol. She’s been wanting one of these for ages, and when I told her we could get one for her to carry on Halloween I thought she would faint of happiness.

Of course when it came time to leave for trick-or-treating and I reminded her to not forget her parasol, she looked at me like I was nuts. “I’m not going to carry that with me, Mom. Someone could get hit in the eye!” Ooooh-kay then.

There were lots of dark houses in the neighborhood where we were, but there were plenty of lights on too. The houses where we stopped, the people inside were always glad to see us and often mentioned that they’d hardly had any trick-or-treaters at all. Most people were generous with the candy, and all the girls got plenty of loot. Annalie was ready to go home after about five houses when I told her we couldn’t eat anything till we got back home and Mommy and Daddy checked out her candy, but we convinced her to keep going a while longer. Eventually all the girls were ready to head home.

We ended the evening with candy, caramel apples, and a showing of the new TinkerBell movie, which got a thumbs-up all around. Annalie fell asleep on the drive home after telling us, “This was my most favorite Halloween ever!”

I think she’s told us that about every single Halloween of her life. Which is just as it should be.

These photos and many more are in the photoset Halloween 2008 on Flickr