Halloween

I had big plans for Halloween this year. I was gonna hit every haunted house/attraction I could find. Halloween crafts all week long, Halloween meals, jack-o-lanterns, fun kids outings, the whole bit.

Well, the month slid by... it came down to the last week and I hadn't hit a single haunted house yet. Derek's on one of his more annoying rotations that has him up at 5:30 and home at 5:30, so he's always tired and not interested in haunted anything.

And I find myself halfway through the week and my babysitters are all going to be at a Halloween party- together. Not that I expected to get anyone-- I mean, c'mon, it's Halloween. What kid doesn't have plans?

So at this point, I decide to pour all my Halloween effort into Friday and Saturday. Friday morning is Avril's Halloween book parade--- dress up as a character from a book and bring the book and march around the school twice while all the parents cheer their kids on.

Avril's costume for Halloween this year is a devil costume. Know any good childrens books about devils? Yeah, me neither. So we opted for the easier route-- a Cinderella costume which she already had for a Cinderella (ok, princess) book she already had.

Isn't my little girl beautiful?

I didn't use enough hairspray or something, because by the time her parade was to start (30 min later), her hair looked like this. Oh, well. She's still so stinkin' cute.

So that night my plan was to hit IHOP for their free Scary Face Pancakes for kids under 12 and then the mermaid show at the Princess Kaiulani Hotel.

Well, neither of those things happened, but we did miraculously find a sitter (a friend of mine hooked us up. How awesome is she?!), so we took advantage of a Halloween date night and got delicious sushi and went to Zombie Prom. Classic love story-- boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love. Parents forbid girl to see boy, girl breaks up with boy, boy commits suicide in local nuclear power plant. Girl mourns boy, boy comes back to life as zombie, campaigns for equal rights for zombies so he can graduate high school and take his girlfriend to prom.

If you ever get the chance to see it, you should. Definitely made for a fun date night.

Saturday morning we got up, made our own scary pancakes (the kind of scary pancakes that it takes about three guesses to figure out what it's supposed to look like and why it's scary) and got dressed.

Borders was "supposedly" doing a Halloween activity with scary stories, a puppet show, a craft and a parade. So we showed up all dressed up and made up and all excited....

and ok, an hour or so late... and of course missed it. I thought with all that stuff we might at least catch the parade by then, but no such luck. Maybe the wrong Borders? Anyway, I let the girls pick out a few books and used my coupon (40% off!) and went home, pretty let down and tired...

By the time we got home, Xandri was asleep, Roman was still napping, Derek was still watching football and Avril wasn't too happy because the day hadn't been fun enough yet.

So we discussed what to do with the rest of the time-- trick or treating and festival thing at Aloha Tower or jack-o-lantern carving and no more driving until the ward trunk-or-treat slash potluck. She opted for jack-o-lanterns and trunk-or-treat, so we got out the pumpkin and she designed the face and I cut it out.

By the time I finished, I was done with Halloween. I got my expectations up too high and tried too hard (well, ok, hard, but not hard enough since they fell through from my own lack of planning) to do all these extra special things that the kids didn't really care about. And then ran out of energy when the day wound down to what they really did want to do.

But I pulled it together anyway and we went to the trunk-or-treat slash potluck (about thirty minutes late which didn't improve my mood any) but when we got there....

"Look at the camera, Roman!"

Xandri made this face BEFORE Daddy said "Silly faces!"



Silly Faces

And why was Roman missing from the previous pictures?

Ahh..... here we go....

The sole picture I got of Derek that actually turned out. Hawaiian pirate. Meaning pirate top, bottom in flipflops and cargo shorts.

and found that we were actually quite fashionably late and it was an easy, laid-back affair (c'mon, where did I think I was? We're in Hawai'i!) I let it all go and enjoyed the potluck (I was a taker this time, I'll admit it) while the kids ran around with their friends and played on the playground equipment.

When it was time for the trunk-or-treat, there weren't many cars, but they had a lot of candy. By the time the kids were done and we left, I think every kid had gone around to each car at LEAST five times. Which worked out fine for us since that was pretty much the only trick-or-treating they got in this year.

All in all, Halloween was fun for the kids, which is the most important thing in my book. It was disappointing and stressful for me (except the things we actually did), but ended well.

So, if I DO have any lurkers out there, you know, you people who read my blog but never comment, I'm asking you to step out of the shadows and give me your ideas. What do you do to make holidays and birthdays special? What kind of traditions do you have for special days, any of them really, but Halloween specifically?...... Bueller?..... Bueller?.....

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.