You know what I could really go for that I haven't had in a while?

Candy.

AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Hold on while I wipe my eyes...where's my handkerchief...?

Seriously, these cute, little, innocent-looking candies are devilish wee things! They look so small I can't help but think they won't count if I eat just one, but I forget saying that to myself 48 times in a row until I can't see the computer monitor through the pile of wrappers piled up on the desk in front of me!

Since Redheaded Snippet took her bounty with her when she left for her youth retreat yesterday, we've got about half the candy we're used to so it's dwindling even faster than usual. The Viking joked that all the Halloween candy would be gone by sundown and I scoffed at him...but he just might be right.

But enough about that, I've got PHOTOS! PHOTOS!! Dad was kind enough to scan the prints Mom made and email them to me. The quality isn't great, them being scans, but you'll get the overall effect. And if The Viking can show me how to retrieve the rest of the pics from Mom's camera, there'll be even more to come.

Without further ado:

There's our Ninja. She would not give us a fierce fighter pose, probably because there were too many of her peers in the vicinity. The Viking loooooooooved this costume and wants to buy 10 of them to use as her school uniform. I won't tell you who that fat lady is behind her, but I believe she was dressed as a very colorful, very lovely gypsy and I hear she is a spectacularly fabulous woman! You would want to be her friend if you knew her, trust me.

I had to get a close up of her eyes, as they were the only exposed area of her body (again, a big thumbs-up from The Viking) and she really liked her make-up (check it out, I did it)! I thought her red eyebrows looked out of place but she wouldn't let me darken them. She had such an attitude problem yesterday, which is something I've noticed she seems to reserve especially for Halloween for some mystifying reason.

There he is, in all his glory. The Man, the Legend, Indy himself. We were worried people would think he was a cowboy because of that stupid jacket (I can't tell you what I went through because of the jacket...I may start foaming at the mouth) but everyone started singing the Indiana Jones theme song at him upon first sight so it must have worked. You can't see them in this shot, but his whip and "leather satchel" are there, coiled around his belt and hanging by his side.

Okay, I relent, a quick word about the jacket after all: besides being the wrong color, it was woefully too long to fit Man-Cub properly. My mother, my one-woman Halloween sweatshop, cut the cuffs and waistband off, cut the sleeves and body down and sewed the cuffs and waistband back on. By hand. In just a few hours. She is amazing and I owe all my kids' Halloween costumes to her.

I wish this shot wasn't so dark (happened during the scanning process, the original is perfect) because this photo is priceless! It wasn't posed at all--he was threatening some very messy form of revenge on me for making him stand still so long--and it's one of the first pics we have that shows how much he's starting to look like The Viking instead of being a carbon copy of me.

"Howdy, Ma'am." What do you think of that 5 o'clock shadow? Eyeshadow and eyeliner did the trick! He was scandalized that I was putting girl make-up on him, but once he got a glimpse of his scruffy-looking, bad-ass self, he delightedly forgave me.

One more successful Halloween in the family memory bank. It wasn't at much fun without Redheaded Snippet here, and I still think a 7:00 curfew is the dumbest thing since hard boiled eggs sold in the freezer section, but we all had fun. Some of the costumes we saw in the school parade were excellent! Our favorite teacher was a three-headed lumberjack (nope, not kidding), another was a great-looking pirate, one 4th-grade boy was an old lady with grey wig, pearls, spectacles and stockings rolled just below his knees, and the crossing guard pulled out all the stops as usual and was a geisha with a fan in one hand and her stop sign in the other! I only saw one head-shaker, a pre-teen boy dressed as a pimp--honestly, what parent allows a child to dress as a flesh peddler--but I didn't see any mini hoochies or little tartlets running around. It really seemed that most people had actually put some thought and effort into their costumes this year.

One slightly negative thing that resulted in the overabundance of those wicked mini candies? No full- or giant-sized candies this year. I blame the economy.

Well, I must be off to catch up on the monstrous heap of laundry languishing on my couch and finish putting away the costume things. We're going to a friend's farm for a hayride and bonfire tonight so I'd better get my work done so I can play with a clear conscience!

And after that, I'm hitting the stores for clearance candy!

P.S. What do you think of the new color scheme? Am I rushing things?