It’s Election Day! I just got done voting and feel great about it. I had some difficulty deciding on the state and local issues, because it seemed that each side was potentially delivering a big, steaming pile of you-know-what in their messages. How should I have waded through all that? Was it possible to make a good decision without being intimately involved with each issue? We’ll only know whether we made the right choices in 5, 10, or 20 years later, but it’s nevertheless important to be involved now.

I hate to usurp this important day with Halloween cuteness, but I will anyway. The kids had a blast on Halloween. I was really impressed with my youngest child, Nathaniel. He had recently turned 3 and really got into trick-or-treating. He kept up with his older sisters magnificently, running from door to door, and never once said he was tired or needed to be carried.

Carrie was dressed as a vampire. I took the opportunity to do a little off-camera flash portrait work in the garden to create some spooky looks. Carrie is channeling Wednesday Adams (a la Christina Ricci) in a minor way. Very, very spooky.

Paige was a cute spooky turtle.

Nathaniel was a lion. I won’t even try to call him spooky.