Halloween: A Choose Your Own Adventure Tale

Option 1:

Halloween dawned bright and crisp. The perfect fall morning began early at our house-- but not too early.
Avril and I got up and I dressed her in her darling, hand-stitched princess costume I had completed weeks in advance. Her hair fell in perfect ringlets on her shoulders and was complimented by a gleaming tiara. Since it was chilly out, I insisted that she also wear her little fur shawl and muff- my little princess couldn't be cold at school, now could she?!


While Avril was at school, Xandri and I had an adventurous morning- we baked the morning away, making dozens of Halloween sugar cookies: witches, ghosts, skulls, goblins. Then we decorated them with delicious homemade frosting, all colored remarkably well. Of course, it wouldn't be a true holiday without the sprinkles, so while Xandri licked the frosting off her fingers and dipped her little fingers back for more, I smiled lovingly and gently wiped her clean.

We dressed up the puppies in their sweet little homemade costumes, Kitty was- you guessed it- a kitty, and The Corporal also dressed as himself in dress blues. We took them to a dog Halloween party in which they tied for first place in the costume contest. When Avril got home, we all went trunk-or-treating (Derek was able to come as well since school was canceled for Halloween), holding hands and skipping from car to car singing Halloween songs.


That evening, to the Halloween soundtrack I had spent the past month assembling, Avril helped me in the kitchen as we prepared a delectable Halloween feast, complete with spider pizza, ghoulish salad, bloody beverages, and snake bites for dessert. In between helping me, Avril would alternately help Derek as he carved out magnificent jack-o-lanterns to sit on our porch. After dinner was over, we had plenty of time to play tidy up the kitchen, clean the girls and puppies, put all of our costumes back on (Derek was an Army general and I was the spitting image of Lara Croft) and head out the door for a night full of trick-or-treating. The girls and puppies all behaved perfectly as neighbor after neighbor answered their doors with oohs and ahs. We finally arrived home exhausted, but full of candy and contentment as we tucked in our darling, tired little girls to sleep at 8:30pm, just in time for Derek and I to settle in for a romantic, but scary movie.



Option 2:

Ok, I don't even know where the morning went. Avril made it to school, dressed and with her hair in a ponytail. I still wasn't sure what to do about a costume, I had a couple ideas that hadn't exactly panned out and I was out of time. Somehow, though, the morning disappeared with none of my frantically laid plans actually coming to fruition. I wound up sticking her in a little dress that was much to small (pictured on Xandri in the beginning pictures) and some borrowed wings to be a fairy for the trunk-or-treat.

And Xandri wore Avril's ladybug costume-- yeah, Avril's costume, which she wore at 4 months of age, also fit my Xandri-- at just shy of 1 year of age.


However, I did manage to make some sugar cookies: all skulls and ghosts, since I knew how to make those without cookie cutters (don't ask me why HyVee didn't have any decent cookie cutters). They wound up being frosting-less since I didn't have any cream cheese and I refuse to make any other kind of frosting. Sadly, most of them turned out extra-crispy since I'm still getting used to how hot my oven cooks.


I also did manage to make a spider pizza and some delicious desserts called snake bites-- a layered dessert with creamy, yogurt-y layers with strawberry Jell-O layers. However, in order to have the time to do this (since I started late and didn't plan it out well), we missed trick-or-treating. For our kids at least. Everyone else in the neighborhood and everywhere else in town managed to knock on our door-- about every 20 seconds, or at least as long as it took me to get back in the kitchen to get my hands back in the dough yet again.


While I was cooking, though, Derek was, at the direction of Avril, carving emotional pumpkins-- an angry one, a happy one and a grumpy one (pictured in that order, left to right). It required pretty much all of Derek's creative juices to figure out how to differentiate angry and grumpy in a jack-o-lantern. In my opinion, it was a smashing success.

And the soundtrack that I'd planned on making? Yeah, I just downloaded 2 or 3 songs and we listened to them over and over until Derek made me turn them off.

The dog-costume contest I didn't know about until after OTHER people posted pictures of their winning pooches...

Anyway, even though we didn't go trick-or-treating (which Avril figured out was the keyword to getting candy from us), I still consider our Halloween a success. So we didn't go quite according to plan... We still had a blast and Avril and Xandri loved it.


And I picked up Avril's new costumes from Wal-Mart after Halloween. Who can beat 75% off? Like she knew the difference, anyway. She LOVES her new costumes (she also has a witch costume, not pictured. That's reserved for next year). (Oh, and confession... all the costume pictures of the girls were not taken on Halloween. No, they were taken over Thanksgiving break...)

Oh, and the scary, romantic movie? Yeah, actually it was The Invisible, which was more like an unintentional comedy. It wasn't that scary, it was ridiculously romantic and overall, we were laughing AT it, not with it in the end.

Also, the following pictures were taken the Friday before Halloween, when Derek and I attended something like a frat party for Halloween. All the med students (unmarried, that is) were there and it was my (naive, yes, I know) first experience at such a party. It was pretty much just like the movies. All my party education comes from the movies... how sad is that? No longer!

This picture I had to put up because in the other one I'm making a really weird face... like I'm trying to be tough but came out looking sick.