Adventures in Trick-or-treating

Sorry these stories are a bit late, but a couple of noteworthy things happened while I was trick-or-treating with the boys:

Some of the homes had a bowl of candy sitting in front of the door, and the boys would take a piece before moving on to the next door. One door's bowl was sitting on a scarecrow dummy, and although Joshua thought it was interesting Daniel didn't want to come close. As he took a piece of candy from the bowl, Joshua vocally noticed that the dummy was moving, at which point Daniel decided he'd rather leave. In an effort to get a piece of candy for Daniel, I set him down and reached for a piece of candy. The "dummy" growled very tamely, clearly not wanting to scare the boys too much. Then, to add to the drama, I gave a little scream. Apparently that was the last straw for Daniel, who started to cry as he backed away. I still feel bad about that, I should have just left it alone. For the rest of the night, Daniel told people about the scarecrow.

A bit later on, we were trick-or-treating at one door when another child arrived with their parent, who complimented the resident on their very spooky spider and web decoration strung cleverly just under a nearby sidewalk lamp. The resident replied that he had not decorated the lamp, at which point we all went to look at the web. On it was a HUGE spider (touch your thumb and index finger together, about that big) with an enormous body. After a bit it started to move, and we could tell from the movement of the legs it was not fake. It was even spookier once we realized it was real!