Halloween 2015

I have to at least get this year's Halloween festivities blogged so there is some record of our fun. Ruby and I decorated a week prior with our lacey ghosts outside and some pumpkins and owls inside and then we finally managed to get to the pumpkin patch the day before Halloween and ran into some old friends from the kids' last school. Halloween day was spent finishing up costumes and letting the kids' have a neighborhood friend come over to play. It was almost 3 o'clock before I realized we hadn't yet carved pumpkins so we did that in a hurry and then rushed inside to fill our bellies for the long night of walking ahead!

The big kids both chose their own costumes early on this year. Ruby was going to be a pink butterfly so we found some worn out butterfly wings at a thrift store and took apart a pink, sparkly H&M dress that no longer fit her to retrofit some new wings. Then we slipped some glow-in-the-dark necklaces inside each wing panel so she'd be easy to spot after dark. Unfortunately, we forgot to take a photo with her wings showing! 

Sebastian went as the robot from his favorite movie this year, Real Steel. It came out a few years ago so we were out of luck finding any licensed costumes on Amazon and decided to try our hand at making our own. I found a few random elements from old costume pieces at one major thrift store in town and then cut out a few pieces of black foam to create a robot type costume. It may or may not have ended up looking like a knight's costume. My bad, Sebastian. Also, no one knew who he was supposed to be but he still scored plenty of candy! 

Smith had no say over his costume. I went as Miss Frizzle, one of the kids' favorite storybook characters, and it only made sense that he would go as Liz, the lizard. I literally walked into the same big thrift store and found his costume two minutes later. I had him put it on every day leading up to Halloween to condition him that dressing up is fun and totally not scary or uncomfortable. He didn't keep his hood on most of the night but he was all about carrying his bucket up each walkway to say hi to everyone. He also discovered dum-dums (the candy, not the pacifiers). 

I sprayed my hair orange and then had to wrap my head in a t-shirt before bed because I was too tired to even take a shower and wash it all out. It was another fun year trick-or-treating in one of the prettiest historic neighborhoods in town along with 4,000 other families and their strollers. I successfully snuck all the Butterfingers from the kids' stashes and reminded myself these are the memories that are worth making no matter how much effort is needed to make them special. 

Next year, though, I'm skipping the orange hair.

-Rachel