It's a Tuesday, a school night, but Kim Eades' house buzzes with activity. On a table in her kitchen are 17 different Halloween costumes, from fuzzy bunnies and ducks to cowgirls and pumpkins and, of course, the perennial Superman outfit. Eades and her guests, six other mothers, with a total of 12 kids between them, crowd around the table, sifting through and admiring the costumes, laughing at the cuteness of it all.

This night, they will swap the kids' Halloween garb, each taking one costume for each old one left behind. The costume swap was an idea hatched by Eades and Stephanie Burnette, who have been supper swapping for almost two years now.

Both would tell you the practice of swapping dinner with each other once a week is part function and part fun. This night's event is the same: a solution to finding a Halloween costume and cleaning out the closet, and a chance for friends and busy mothers to hang out, sip wine and catch up.

"The scramble for Halloween costumes every year is just kind of tedious," Burnette says. "It creeps up on you because it's between school starting and the holidays. ... It was kind of a good excuse to have a girls' night."

Swapping is really twofold in purpose, the two say: to save money and to put old things to good use. Halloween costumes, which tend to multiply year after year, seemed the perfect reason.

"They only wear it for a night," says Kimberley Westbury, a mother of one, and then the costumes are relegated to the closet.

Once the swap gets under way, Eades finds a lion for her son, Graham, and Burnette grabs a Dalmatian suit for her son, Chip. Melissa Janse, an emergency room doctor and mother of a 6-year-old and a 15-month-old, picks up a pair of miniature green scrubs.

"Oh, Carter has to have these," she says, laughing. "They're perfect."

The scrubs once belonged to Christina Rogers' kids. Rogers, a mother of three, digs through the pile on the table and finds a duck suit for her 4-month-old.

Each mother estimates the swap will save her at least $20 per costume.

"My son may not wear those," Janse says, holding up the mini scrubs. "But I didn't pay anything, so there's no loss."

The swap ends in about five minutes and the women and friends are back to the girls' night out part of the evening. They grab a slice of caramel apple and catch up.

"If we don't get together now and celebrate the weather cooling off, you're going to blink and it's going to be Christmas," Burnette says. "And then who knows where everyone will be?"

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