I was invited to my children's Halloween party yesterday so I could cast a distainful eye on the other kid's parent's costuming ability. They in turn had the opportunity to draw hasty conclusions on my own worth as a parent.

I counted two firemen, two vampires, a spiderman, a sadly-deflated superman, a batman, a couple other licensed cartoon characters, and about a hundred fairy princesses. Luckily, Talia is precocious, and went through the whole magic wands and pointy hats phase about a year ago, so she had an original costume. Some sort of ghost. A garden ghost, I think. Or something. Max went in this year's most popular costume, as a pirate. He managed to get the no-dental-plan teeth look in this photo by messily masticating a lump of chocolate.

Related: Last year's Halloween. The year before that (too cute).