ghosts, goblins & scary, hairy 28 year old men

As we all know, Halloween is supposed to be a VERY scary day. People dress up in all sorts of crazy costumes and people hang spider webs up on purpose all over their porches and windows. People dress up in scary attire and paint their faces and hide in corners of rooms so that they can jump out and scare the crap out of other people who actually pay money to wet their pants. Other people dress up and sit as still as possible on their porch so that they can yell BOO at the the trick-or-treaters who climb up their front steps for some free candy and end up dropping it all as they make a mad dash for an escape. Other people fire up chain saws and chase after innocent bystanders who are desperately trying to make their way out of a seemingly impossible maze made up of big, tall, dried-up cornstalks that give you the creeps anyway because of the sound they make when the wind blows.

All of these are good examples of what make Halloween scary. But the thing that makes Halloween the spookiest is the fact that it was the day that William Colton Swan entered the world.

Colton was born in Logan, Utah on Halloween night in 1980. His family (Dad, Mom, E'lise, Shayler, and Heather) lived in the Triads on campus at Utah State. Marlene said she was "overdue and huge"--as with all of her pregnancies, but her water finally broke around 2pm. This was the only time that her water ever broke on it's own & she was certainly excited to see it happen because her due date had passed about 2 weeks earlier! She called John, who was working in Hyrum at the time. When they finally got ahold of each other, they got their things together and headed to the hospital. Ike and Barb were in town and took the other kids trick-or-treating, because although they were excited to see whether they were going to have a new little sister or a brother, they didn't want to miss out on the Halloween fun either. John and Marlene got to the hospital at 6 pm that evening and the new baby arrived around 9pm. Colton gave his parents quite a scare as he made his grand entrace into this world because the chord was wrapped around his neck & had been for quite awhile. But when all was said and done, the Swan family welcomed a new baby boy who was 22 inches long and 9 lbs. 6 oz. to their nearly complete family.

28 years later, Colton is still scaring us--almost on a daily basis! But he sure makes life exciting too.

hAppY BirThdAy BaBe!