Just in time for Thanksgiving...

... I'll finally post about Halloween.

With Ellie's party consuming the first half of the month, our Halloween crafts and field trip season was cut short, but we did manage a trip to a cute, boutique-laden shopping area called Gardner Village that decorated the grounds with a variety of curiously engaged witches. Unfortunately, it's an outdoor shopping area so our fingers and faces nearly froze, but knowing there was a discounted cookie at the end of our witch scavenger hunt pushed us to our reward.

I didn't get good pictures, but some of the animatronix witches were doing pretty interesting things, like the one biking in the sky you can see in the background. I'm waaaay too cheap to purchase any of the merchandise being sold in such a shopping venue, but I did a whole lot of adorable window shopping.

Halloween afternoon, Kyle helped the kids carve pumpkins.

Erik has recently developed a love for violin-playing and requires only simple props to do so.

We knew the kids would be up late Halloween night, so tried very hard to coerce them into napping. On account of her head full of sponge rollers, Ellie never fell asleep, and this is how she felt about her new hair-do.

And this is how Charlie felt about being ignored all day while I finished up the kids' Halloween costumes (actually I was trying to take a picture of him sleeping in his bumbo-- poor, neglected third child-- but he woke up as I was taking it).

It was hard to get a picture in which Ellie was more than a blur-- she was almost as excited about candy as I was that Erik finally agreed to wear his costume.

Why Mario Bros? When my kids found out Carter and Holden were planning to be Mario and Luigi, they were determined to complete the video game's cast.


Rowan was the star (I've never played it myself, but I believe stars are claimed for temporary invincibility or some other desirable), and Charlie went as Toad.

Mish crocheted the cute turban hat for him.


Erik kept insisting Bowser is an elephant, though I corrected him showing him pictures like this numerous times, and made sure he really was partial to being a fire-breathing turtle/dragon villain for a night. He never entertained the thought of being anything but Bowser for Halloween, though he clearly misunderstood the full commitment...

He was thrilled about it, all the way up until Halloween, at which time he utterly refused to have anything to do with his costume. It wasn't until all the other kids already had lollipops in their mouths that he consented to make his transformation. I threw orange poster paint in his hair and eyebrows while he wasn't looking (though not nearly as much as I'd planned to).

Oh yes, and I had yellow clothes for him to wear under his shell, but given his unpredictable moods, we didn't dare remove his red Incredibles pajamas, which he's been wearing under his clothes (interchangeably with skeleton jammies from his cousins L&L, and sometimes one over the other) daily for several weeks. The other day at the library, he stripped off his sweatshirt and waddled around with his pants around his ankles for the hour or so we were there, unwilling to cover up the Incredibles pajamas under his clothes. We got a lot of bewildered and disapproving looks, but it's truly not worth arguing with this stubborn two-year-old on such trivial matters as wearing pants in public.


Ellie was naturally pleased as punch to be the token female character in the cast of Mario Bros: Princess Peach.


You may notice that Princess Peach doesn't have tight ringlet curls a la Shirley Temple. See, I figured Ellie's hair, being thin and fine like mine, would not hold curl well so would require such a drastic measure to achieve even the subtle waves of Peach's hair. Turns out her hair holds sponge roller curl quite well. In fact, it was still holding attractive curl for church the next day. And was still pretty cute three days later.

When Carter first saw Ellie, he knew exactly what to say: "Ellie, you look so silly.... and beautiful!" We couldn't help but smile as he called her Peach all night, saying things like, "I'll wait for you, Peach" and "I'll hold Peach's hand."

I have to give proper credit to Kjerstin, who made Ellie's dress with her own bare hands, as a birthday gift. She did an incredible job and saved me weeks of stress and further sleep deprivation by taking care of that costume. It is definitely Ellie's prettiest and new favorite dress-up item, and will be for a while, I'm sure.

We wrapped up trick-or-treating when five out of six of our kids were being held, complaining of exhaustion. The weather was, amazingly, not very cold, and it made for a perfectly enjoyable evening. The occasional school-aged child even recognized my children's costumes for what they were! (I mean, only a few young guys recognized Bowser, and though people appreciated Ellie's pretty dress, only video game generation-ers could appreciate how closely she resembled Peach.)

Here they're showing off the pumpkins they designed, with Dorito-stained mouths, the first treat they both chose to open from their goody bags.

After I rinsed that paint out of Erik's scalp and scrubbed the sugar out of the kids' teeth, they were out in a wink and the real partying began! For a celebration at the Paul's, I convinced Kjerstin to fill the role Kyle refused to with me. We were Sick and Tired, cuz that's about how I feel about being sick and tired for the past some odd months.

Somehow Kyle preferred to go as a Libyan capitalist. Yes, everyone thought he was a terrorist.

And as long as we were rejecting political correctness, Mish just plain went as a Mexican. Donning stick-on earrings, Charlie went as her illegitimate child.

We had fun playing games and stuffing ourselves with more sugar even than our kids consumed, including these eyeball doughnuts Kjerst made with Ellie,

and these from-scratch pumpkin pies by Mish.

Delicious, delightful, de-lovely and wonderful Halloween, my best one yet.