It was quite the Halloween season.

Sloan and Beau pose with their cousins, Johnny and Mik, at the Mead High School trunk-or-treat event. Halloween 2026 was awesome for the Reser family.

In addition to trick-or-treating on Saturday night and their own Halloween parties at school, I took Sloan and Beau to eight different public community Halloween-related events over the course of a week and a half.

Because when you buy expensive costumes, you have to get your money’s worth, right?

I made sure Sloan and Beau maximized the time they had in their costumes.

But in all honesty, I just love this time of year and I love doing fun things with my kids. It also helps that this Spokane community is incredible and puts forth such a strong effort to serve the youth.

Spokane does so much for Halloween and I really enjoyed the chance to enjoy it with my kids.

This blog post would go forever if I broke down each event we attended so I will save the quick recap just for Halloween weekend. But I did want to mention one theme from this spooky season: haunted houses/mazes.

Sloan, Beau, my sister, and cousins wait outside a haunted house entrance. Beau had me hold him while Sloan didn’t go in.

Some of the Halloween events we attended offered haunted attractions which were very subdued to a horror-seeker like myself but a first test for someone like Beau. For the most part, he loved them and wanted to go again. In a couple other instances, he wanted me to hold him. Sloan? She stood outside the door and said “NO WAY.” 😂

Sloan preferred to refrain from the haunted house attractions. This photo is of her with two classmates.

I can’t express how nice our Halloween weekend was. On Friday we attended the St. Mary Catholic School Halloween Carnival/Trunk-Or-Treat. It was fun to watch our kids run wild with their classmates while also getting the chance to catch up with our fellow-parents/friends. Our school community is so awesome.

Beau does the cake walk at the St. Mary Catholic School Halloween Carnival in his t-rex costume.

After the school event, we headed to Red Robin for our Halloween evening. It was relaxing to sit down with my family after a busy day at work and enjoy delicious hamburgers. The main reason why we chose Red Robin was because everyone who showed up in costume received a free sundae. We told Beau he couldn’t go inside with his t-rex costume so he opted for his Stitch outfit.

Sloan and Beau show the sundaes they received for wearing costumes at Red Robin on Oct. 30, 2026.

On Halloween night I took Beau trick-or-treating for the first time in our neighborhood. It was our initial experience because before this past weekend, the ‘hood was in different stages of development. With it now pretty much completely built, it made since to stay on our home turf. In our neighborhood the houses are built pretty closely together so Beau could quickly go house-to-house. Or should I say driveway-to-driveway? Pretty much all neighbors set up shop outside as burned fires, grilled food, played music, and handed out LOTS of candy. Beau’s treat bag was practically full after only hitting up a fraction of the Elk Meadows houses.

Beau approaches a house that had a makeshift library set up for children to take a book (yes, they had candy too). The trick-or-treat vibe in Elk Meadows was outstanding.

With Beau not wanting to haul his bag around any longer, we returned home to pass out candy with Sidney and Sloan. Like our other neighbors, we stayed outside in our lawn chairs and distributed candy to the throngs of costumed kids/teens that walked up our driveway. It was a perfect family activity for the four of us to do. After we hit the 200 mark of trick-or-treaters—even though we had more candy to give out—we decided to head inside and close up shop.

It was a lot of fun handing out candy with Sid and the kids on Halloween night.

But just because we stopped handing out candy didn’t mean we ceased celebrating Halloween. We heated up frozen pizza and watched “Hocus Pocus” together. Once the sugar highs wore off, we turned off the movie with about 30 minutes to go and headed upstairs to bed.

I hope everyone else had a fulfilling Halloween. If we had the pleasure of hanging with you this month, thanks for being part of our spooky season. Don’t Blink.