Jude decided this year that he wanted to be something scary. Dementor was a compromise because his first pick was a beheaded ghoul carrying his bloody head around. Lovely. Harry Potter and Yoda are recycled. I'm thrifty like that.
704 ... the grand total of Halloween candy given out this year, give or take a few chocolate eyeballs and Mary Janes I ate in between trick or treaters. This year I was prepared for the onslaught with mounds of candy and only gave one candy per kid and even had some left over. Woo hoo. Kids started arriving at around 4:30 and it didn't stop until about 8:30! Luckily my little Harry Potter, Dementor and Yoda came home early to help pass out candy. There were hordes of cute Japanese trick or treaters or I should say tricka treatos. So cute. The moms apparently did not know that you could knock on someone's door, if their porch lights were on. When the line got too deep to my stoop, I would send them to my neighbors and the parents would repeatedly ask daijobu-des? Is this ok? Some of the kids even squealed with delight when Jacquie would open her door holding a basket of candy. A few newbie kids didn't even have bags, so I set them up and sent them on their way.
My friend Gretchen was hosting several families from her sons Japanese pre-school. Another friend brought in families from her kids gymnastics class. Not really sure how the thousands of other Japanese kids got on base but they did. They are so grateful and never just grab the candy but wait for you to put it in their bags. I really love the bows and arigato gozaimus's.
We hang these huge cat eyes in the upstairs windows that look really scary. Some of the parents would say sugoi, sugoi which just means "very" and a few others would say something that sounds exactly like the word for cute "kawaii". The same word I have heard spoken to Anders hundreds of times and yes the same word I had spoken to other Japanese parents when they had particularly cute babies. Then it dawned on me that I had been calling Japanese babies "scary". That would explain some of the surprised/horrified looks I have received. As soon as Brad and the boys got back I raced over to Gretchen's house to ask her Japanese guests about it. I thought that when people would call Anders kuwaii that their over pronounced kawaiiiiii was kind of like saying "oh soooooo cuuuuute. Wrong. Apparently carrying out the eeeeee sound at the end is what separates it from kowai which means scary. Gretchen's guests got a good laugh at me, well as good as super polite Japanese people ever do. How mortifying. To top it off I keep seeing this one commercial on AFN (Armed Forces Network) telling us how we are ambassadors for the USA and to always make a good impression. I suppose calling babies scary is not being a good ambassador. Lord knows what else I have said in Japanese.
Kawaiiiiiiiii! Anders went to the base's haunted house as a monkey.
Jude's storybook character parade for his class. I tried desperately to get him to go as a Buccaneer Bunny but no luck.
First round of tricka treatos.
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