Carnivals, Costumes, Candy and such . . .

Every year we have an annual Harvest Festival at our church. It usually coincides with Halloween and is a fun, safe carnival style event for kids. This year it was a couple days early as we really didn't feel like hosting the event on a Monday night. There are lots of game booths including the ring toss, bean bag toss, and many many more. There is one game where little participants can throw a ball through the openings of characters from the Bible story of Daniel and the Lions' den. As we were closing up shop the targets became costumes for Garrett, Matthew, and a couple of their friends.
The harvest festival in the rear view mirror our two boys donned their costumes in the early afternoon, October 31st, to got out and find candy. Here are G & M as cast members from How to Train your Dragon
While Matthew wasn't exactly a toothless replica, we do believe he was a cute little dragon.
Luckily the nearby shopping complex has their own Trick or Treat event every year. So the boys went out and invaded Barnes and Noble, Rubios, Jamba Juice, Old Navy and many more establishments. They took in quite a haul.
The best part of the night, however, was when we got home. We didn't go out into the neighborhood, but we still were ready to be invaded by hordes of candy seeking costume clad children. Garrett wanted to hand out the candy. Really, I just had to be nearby (Lori was distracted watching her beloved Chargers play).

Garrett had more fun handing out candy than he had getting candy earlier in the day. I was so proud of him to be excited to be the candy-giver. He truly was more blessed giving than receiving.
And that brought October to an end. But less than a week later, Garrett attended a birthday party that included a face painter. So the G-man became a tiger. A pretty cool looking tiger if you ask me. (For the record Matthew was there as well, but he wanted no part of the face painting).