On Wednesday Ellie and I went out trick-or-treating. (See Shelly's blog for pictures of our cute little ladybug.) We joined up with a couple of other families in our ward and hit the far end of the Amberleigh, our townhouse subdivision.

Last year, Ellie couldn't walk by herself and it took half the night for her to pick up on the idea that we were going door to door to get things that she could put into her little sack. (Of course, once she picked up on it, she really got into it.) This year, it only took the first house, our next-door neighbors, for her to realize that this was going to be a fun night. She now knows what candy is, and when she saw the neighbors with a big bowl of it, and her with an empty plastic pumpkin, she proceeded to just fill 'er up. I think a full third of the night's candy haul came from that first stop.

Two incidents along the trick-or-treating trail bear mentioning.

At one house, Ellie and I were a little bit behind the rest of the group, and three of the boys with us got to the door first. Suddenly, the door whipped open to reveal a man in a gorilla suit! The three boys didn't scream, but each one instantaneously did an about face and began running away down the walk.

Ellie and I then slowly approached the "monkey"* and I asked Ellie if she wanted to get some candy from the monkey. She seemed a little timid, but we made it to his candy bowl. Then, thinking the gorilla suit was a great Halloween thing, I asked Ellie if she wanted to have her picture taken with the monkey, and I set her down in front of him to pose. "NOOOOOO!" she cried. "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! No like the monkey! No like the monkey!"

I apologized to the gorilla and we went on our way. Ellie was still quite traumatized by the monkey for some time. In fact, for the rest of the night, she would randomly cry out, "No like the monkey! Monkey go home!" Not to take pleasure from others' trauma (especially my sweetie's), but it was pretty funny.

As we were driving home, her insistences became more specific: "No like the monkey! Monkey go home! Monkey go downstairs, play toys! Monkey play choo-choo train! Monkey play cars!" Even a couple of days later, she still brings him up, hoping that he's safe in his basement playing with his toys, where he can't bother her.

The second episode was perhaps a little more strange. Ellie and I were on the porch of a nice, normal lady's house, picking some candy out of her bowl. There were a bunch of other kids and families all around us in that general vicinity. As Ellie was reaching for a piece of candy, a somewhat elderly Indian woman wearing a sari squoze herself past me to address the woman of the house. The Indian woman held out a dollar bill. The lady with the candy looked at her perplexedly. "For you," said the Indian woman. "What? No," said the candy woman. "All these babies, all these children," said the Indian woman in very poor English, motioning at all the kids all around who had been taking the candy woman's candy. "No, really. It's my treat. Thank you, but no," said the candy woman, baffled at the realization that she was being reimbursed for her candy expenses. Eventually, the Indian woman won, and the candy woman took the dollar. I was standing right there for the whole thing. When the Indian woman left, the candy woman and I looked at each other. "That was strange," I said. "I know. I've never seen anything like that," she said.

Perhaps that should have been the house where Ellie loaded up on extra pieces of candy.

Finally, here's a picture of the pumpkin I carved this year (it says "Happy Halloween"):





* It really pained me to allow Ellie to refer to a gorilla as a "monkey." To me, knowledge of the fact that gorillas are not monkeys is one of the key distinctions between smart people and stupid people. But Ellie doesn't know the word "gorilla" and this wasn't the appropriate time to teach her. We'll work on it later. One day, Ellie will even know the erudite fact that pterodactyls are not, technically, dinosaurs.