Happy Halloween!

Veronica celebrated it on Thursday night by going trick-or-treating for the first time.

Now, we weren't originally going to dress her up, thinking that it would be pointless: She's too little to eat the candy, so taking her around the neighborhood would basically look like we were trolling for candy ourselves. But on my drive home Thursday evening, I started thinking that last year's Snow White dress would probably still fit her. And lo and behold, it did.

So the plan was amended: Jason would stay at the house and pass out candy, and I would walk Veronica around the neighborhood; however, we would not pick up any candy. We would just say hello and such. We left, her holding my hand and walking around on the sidewalks, gleefully kicking the fallen leaves.

The first house we stopped at had a man and woman handing out candy. They cooed at how adorable she looked, while she just stared at them. The man insisted on handing her a little Twix bar. She held it tight in her left hand, held onto my hand with her right, and we moved onto their yards where they had three rabbits in a little pen. It was the first time she's ever seen real bunnies before, and she smiled and stared for a while before we moved on.

It took a while to walk up the next cul-de-sac to the second house, a heavily decorated place with tons of Halloween Winnie-the-Pooh decorations and the Nickelodeon toons' Halloween soundtrack playing. A man was standing outside dressed all in orange, but as he saw us coming up the street, he yelled into his house "Bridget! You need to come see this!" His wife came out and they completely made over Veronica and how adorable the little Snow White looked. The man insisted on giving her a little Milky Way bar, but she couldn't hold both it and the Twix. "We weren't planning on getting any candy, since she's too little to eat most of it," I explained, but they had a fix: The woman (Bridget) ran inside and got a little Halloween bucket for her candy. Veronica happily dropped her candy into the bucket, and we moved on.

The third house we stopped at had a man with an OU hat sitting in front of his garage. We talked about OU for a few minutes, and since there weren't a lot of kids out, he said to take whatever Veronica liked out of the candy bowl. He happened to have little Dum Dum suckers, and Veronica loves the root beer ones; however, there was only one in the bowl. "Wait just a minute, I'll get the rest," he said, and ran inside. We dug through the entire bag, finding the root beer ones and handing them to Veronica, who promptly plopped them into her bucket. She ended up with about eight or nine of them. I thanked him and we moved on.

She hit four or so more houses, and all the while I kept trying to get her to say "trick or treat" to no avail. She did say "thank you" to our neighbor across the street, but he was already back inside by the time she got it out. At any rate, after two cul-de-sacs, she was tired and we went home.

Now, here comes something that still confuses me and Jason: When she got home, she started taking her little candy bars out of her bucket, one by one, saying "yum!" and trying to hand them up for the cat to eat. What puzzles us is the fact that Veronica had never eaten a candy bar before in her life. How did she know? They weren't even unwrapped yet!

After a few minutes, Jason runs into the garage and leaves the door open; I was in another room (probably the bathroom or something). He heard a little voice at the door saying "trick o' treat!" and dashed to the door, figuring that a little kid was at the door. Well, he was right: There stood Veronica, in our front entryway, finally saying "trick o' treat!" Jason went back outside, and she came up to the screen door with her little bucket and yelled "trick o' treat!" once again. He opened the door and dropped a piece of candy into her bucket. She smiled great big and walked away. Too, too cute.

One of our last candy hand-outs of the night was for the aforementioned Bridget, her two children, a friend or family member of hers, and that woman's two children. One of Bridget's kids was dressed as Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz," and one of the other girls was dressed like Cleopatra. We all chatted for a few minutes, and Jason gave the children some candy and stickers. But Veronica apparently liked Cleopatra; she kept taking candy out of our bowl as we talked and threw it into Cleopatra's basket. When she could no longer reach the candy in our bowl, she started taking items out of Dorothy's basket and tossing them into Cleo's. We all laughed quite a bit about that. (The girl dressed as Dorothy was only 2 years old and really didn't notice or care that her goodies had been filched.)

It was so cute and wonderful, celebrating Halloween with Veronica this year. Can't wait to see how Christmas plays out in December. :-)

The world according to Veronica:

Apparently, the words "cheese sandwich", when uttered together, are hysterically funny. In fact, if one's mommy utters these words, the appropriate response is to start giggling, then do a little dance, then place your toys on the floor so you can hold a piece of said sandwich and eat it. When Mommy asks a few minutes later, "Do you want another piece of cheese sandwich?", repeat.

That's all for now. More later. :-)