Halloween 2013 - Goodbye Nana

Today was an extremely sad day for our family.  My husband's grandma, our warm-hearted and loving Nana, passed away.  Despite the fact that she was 90 years old, I didn't expect her to go so suddenly.  She had been having heart issues and was in and out of the hospital over the past 2 weeks.  But they had put in a pace maker and I had just assumed she would come out of it fine (just like she has quickly come out of other hospitalizations in the past).  But she slid downhill quickly.  Luckily, my husband was able to be with her in her final moments and was with her when she died.  She knew he was there and I think that's comforting to him.

I tried to keep it together for the kids because they're really too young to understand what happened to Nana.  They just know that they won't see her again and that "she died".  My husband loves Halloween and is normally the one to take the kids trick or treating.  But understandably, he didn't feel up to it tonight.  So I took the kids around the block with some other neighborhood kids.  They had a blast and Sammy really raked in the candy.  At 2.5 years old, she knew she could take the candy offered to her.  But she had no inhibitions about grabbing one, two, three and even four pieces at a time.  So she ended up with WAY more candy than Ian (who apparently understood social conventions a bit more).  I ended up putting some of her candy in Ian's bowl so that he wouldn't get bummed by it.  Here is my bumble bee transformer (this is what he asked to be) and my princess (she asked to be one).

And here's what our front stoop looked like.  This year, we added a skeleton in the lawn, which you can't really see in the picture.