trick or treat

I did my very best to keep Halloween simple this year! We were still very sleep deprived, and in new baby land, and figuring out how to juggle four children.

 

Originally Toby wanted to be a Bad Piggy (like in the Angry Birds game.)  But as he began to see the costumes in the stores he changed his mind to wanting to be a bat.  Not Batman.  Not a vampire.  Just a bat.  Let me just tell you, there are no bat costumes at Walmart.  In the end I made him these bat wings out of black fleece and wooden dowels and he wore all black.  I also made him bat ears on a headband AND we bought a Batman mask as a back-up in case he didn't like my ears.  He wore the ones I made to our church party and the Batman mask on Halloween.  EVERY person asked him if he was Batman, and he would say, "No, I am a bat." 

 

Charlotte wanted to be a witch.  We got a pointy hat, a broom, and some stripey tights, and voila!  Witch.  I also got her a green witchy nose (at her request) which she then refused to wear because "it's not very cute."

 

Jakey was Tigger.  Until he saw Toby's Batman mask.  Then we had a serious problem.  So we had Bat-Tigger at our church party as a compromise, and Jakey actually refused to go trick or treating this year when he saw the first kid who came to our door dressed as a zombie.  He stayed home and handed out candy with Dad and Amelie instead.

 

 

 

Amelie dressed in her glow-in-the-dark skeleton jammies that Aunt Melissa sent.  She slept through the Halloween party, and then screamed while handing out candy to trick-or-treaters with Daddy and Jake.

 

 

We hit the pumpkin patch a little late this year and our only options were enormous or teeny-weeny. 

We went with teeny-weeny.  We picked out 6 pumpkins and let the kids draw faces on them and use stickers to decorate them.  I seem to be the only person in this house who likes to carve Jack-o-lanterns, and I was fine with taking the year off this once.  Maybe by next year one of the kids will be willing to help scrape out the pumpkins.

 

In addition to our church party/trunk-or-treat and regular trick-or-treating, Toby had a party at preschool, and Charlotte had a party at ballet.  There is so much candy!  Even with just the 2 big kids going basically around the block (we were out for just over 30 minutes) we received more Halloween candy than in any year past!  What is up with that?  Isn't there a recession or something?  I was totally blown away by the extent our neighbors went to for this holiday.  One house even had LIVE BATS flying around.  No joke, fruit bats that they keep in their garage, were flying around outside their house.  It was very cool.  Also, I won second place in the chili cook-off at church.  I got a two-inch tall trophy and everything! lol.  So it ended up being a very fun Halloween for our family this year.