Mystery, Inc. and a Big Thank You

 As promised, here are the photos from Halloween, when we were lucky enough to spend the evening with Daphne and Scooby, two of my favorite members of the Mystery, Inc. team.  (I tried to convince Tim to dress up like Shaggy, but he wouldn't do it.  Then again, I wasn't willing to dress up as Velma, either.)

This was right before we left to go trick-or-treating, so Emma was pretty excited to take out her brand new purple pumpkin bucket.  In the background, you can see our jack-o-lantern, designed my Ms. Emma herself.

In this picture, I imagine Scooby saying "Ruh roh!"

Trick-or-treating went well, as it always does.  These kids may never appreciate what a great street they live on when it comes to trick-or-treat.  So many houses, all in a row, all ready to give out tons and tons of candy.  Their parents never had it so easy!  It's great fun for us too, to see the whole street just teeming with kids in their costumes, running from house to house, hopped up on sugar and adrenaline.  Everyone around here gets into the holiday spirit, and it truly becomes a neighborhood social event.  Of course, we were smart enough to bring Drew in the stroller and just keep him strapped in the whole time.  He could care less about the candy anyways!

Also, I meant to share this earlier...

One of the local radio stations did a project recently called The Big Thank You.  The goal was to get their listeners to submit at least 400,000 hand-written letters, so that they would have enough to deliver one to each and every military service member deployed overseas on Thanksgiving Day. 

Since we come from a family with multiple military members, both retired and active, we felt moved to write a letter from our family, which we did.  But Emma wanted to write her very own letter too.  I forgot to snap a picture of the back, where she drew a lovely Fall scene, but her letter was so sweet that I just had to capture it for posterity:



And by the way, they ended up collecting over 500,000 letters when all was said and done.  And though you may not receive one of these letters over the holidays (because you are thankfully home and not overseas), we also want to say a big thank you to our family members who have served and those who continue to do so, to protect us and our freedoms. So THANK YOU!