Talk about going through the motions. Grown-ups never cease to amaze me, and not always in a good way. Last night we trick-or-treated with our kids for two hours in a Kid-friendly neighborhood where houses were decorated, pumpkins lined sidewalks, and some houses even had creepy music piped out into the street. It was everything a kid could want for Halloween.

Except that we walked up to house after house in ridiculously brilliant homemade costumes, rang doorbells, sang out Trick-or-Treat in sweet little 5-year old and 8-year old voices, and had people open the door, stoop down, put candy into outstretched pillowcases without ever looking up or saying anything about the costumes.

At one house, my little ice-cream sandwich tried to engage the woman at the door by telling her he’d just turned Five. She nodded and said Happy Birthday, but didn’t say, “Oh wow – you painted that – what are you?”

Ben started working on his costume in the shop over the winter. This is the prototype Iron Man costume, the same one that Tony Stark built out of scraps in a cave. Ben was in character the whole time he was building it, working up a sweat pounding metal from the scrap metal pile, wearing a tank top. He gave himself a cold, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

It wasn’t like we were entirely invisible the whole night. We got a few people who stopped, and complimented the hard work that went into these costumes. We had a few people say they were the best costumes of the night. We even had some other kids and other parents in homemade costumes stop Ben and Bean on the sidewalk to talk about their costumes and inspect them, knock on the helmet and feel the workmanship behind it. At a few houses the boys were given an extra handful of candy for their ingenuity. Now, that’s what we’re talkin’ about!