Princesses, fairies, and dragons -- oh, my!

Kathleen announced this afternoon that Halloween is her favorite holiday. While that's got some theological implications we can't really support, we've got to admit that we had a lot of fun!

We spent the evening with Kathleen and Madeline's good friend Audrey, her parents, and her baby sister Vivienne. We spent the first part of the evening trying to encourage our girls to eat the (reasonably) healthy ravioli we prepared for dinner, and the last part of the evening discouraging them from eating too much candy. In between? We delighted in their delight!

Since I forgot to get pictures until it was dark, the picture isn't particularly good. You can see, though, that our friend Audrey was Tinkerbell, Kathleen was Snow White, Madeline was Cinderella, and John David rounded out the group as the dragon (he's a bit too small to be the prince -- and a dragon gets to roar!). Nan and Grandpa had taken our girls to the Disney store as a surprise several weeks ago and let the girls choose their costumes. I've felt a bit guilty about not making their costumes (look, I never said I wasn't crazy), but the girls were (and are) so pleased and so excited about their princess dresses that I've mostly made peace with it. Plus, I thought it was particularly cute to see the three girls in their glittery Disney costumes.

Anyway, once we'd finished torturing our children with things like dinner and photographs, we turned them loose to trick or treat. We could hardly keep up with them!

The three friends ran and laughed, chirped "trick-or-treat, thank you, happy Halloween!" more times than I can count, and brought home an astonishing amount of candy. It was a magical night that we were blessed to share with friends.

Disappointed by my blurry nighttime Halloween photographs, I convinced our princesses and dragon to pose for me again the next afternoon. (To be fair, we didn't have to do too much convincing! In fact, the girls stayed in their dresses when we went out to dinner later that night, amusing the other diners, who only wear costumes on Halloween.)

Cinderella is clutching her skirt here (nice slippers, huh?) because the dragon kept trying to eat it.

So, our dragon.

And then Cinderella.

Snow White was "too busy" to stand around for extra photos, but she cheerfully participated in the group attempts. They went just about as well as they ever do... and that's really fine by us. That's just life at the circus!