In a last minute switcheroo, my wife decided to stay home and hand out candy while I went trick-or-treating with the kids.
I had six kids in my group: four 10-year-old boys — a mummy (my kid), two ninjas, and an evil baseball catcher — plus a hyperactive 6-year-old cheerleader and a 5-year-old Blue’s Clues girl.
The cheerleader was a dynamo — the first kid to every door — and if it wasn’t opened promptly, she’d run around looking in the windows to see what was the holdup.
The evil baseball catcher — wearing a chest protector, shin guards and a skull mask — approached every house by taking a running start and sliding up to the door on his shin guards, scaring women, small children and pretty much everyone else, because no one expected him to do that, and because it looked like he’d fallen and given himself a crippling injury.
“You won’t be laughing when he does that and some old lady has a heart attack,” one mom said to me.
But the highlight of the evening came when one of the ninjas got tired of menacing the other ninja and pointed his sword at the kinetic cheerleader, who swung her candy bag around and knocked the sword halfway across the street.
It was a big hit with the whole group because you rarely get to see a ninja schooled by a cheerleader half his size . . .