It's a small world!

I wanted to share a picture of my kids from Halloween night. This is Nathan, Nicole and Neil. The past 2 years we've taken the boys trick-or-treating locally in our little town of Bigfork. We knew it was going to rain Halloween night, so we decided to try the mall in Kalispell. Neil is at a stage where he has a love/hate relationship with Halloween. He loves dressing up and he loves getting candy, but he hates scary costumes and decorations. I figured the mall would be good because it would be well lit. We got there early, which was definitely a good thing. After going through the entire mall trick-or-treating, the boys stopped to walk across a little stage for a costume contest. By the time we were leaving, the mall was jam packed with people, so I was glad we had gotten there early. The boys had a lot of fun and got to see other kids in their costumes. Nicole is 17 and wanted to walk around with her little brothers this year. She wasn't sure what she wanted to wear, but the boys really wanted her to dress up. At the very last minute, she put on one of Rick's old flightsuits from when he worked in the helicopter air unit for the sheriff's department. She even had flight glasses, but you can't see them here. But what is really interesting about her costume is this -- a few minutes after we walked into the mall, a man ran up to Rick and said, "Hey, do you remember me?" It turns out it was a retired deputy sheriff that Rick used to work with nearly 20 years ago in California. He had seen the patches on Nicole's flightsuit and recognized them immediately. He had to run up to us to see if he knew who Rick was and was amazed that they used to work together so many years ago. Now what's the chance of that? He had moved to Montana a few years back and was now working for a local fire department up here. Talk about a small world!