Halloween 2013

I thought we were doing really great lining up Egyptian mummification with Halloween this school year. Yep, I was pretty proud of myself. One of the most talked-about projects from our history curriculum is the chicken mummy. In my plans, the girls were going to experience the full mummification process, taking over a month, with their Daddy working on a chicken (or perhaps a techni-colored ditch chicken....pheasant). Apparently, though, neither girl fell in love with mummies; both found the whole process, which was greatly (and appropriately so) simplified in our book's explanation, sort of disgusting; and neither one was at all interested in mummifying a chicken.

Hot dogs, on the other hand? Absolutely! *Sigh* Notice the "mummy" sausage-dog on the left has raisin eyes? That student does not care for mustard. Notice the "mummy" sausage dog on the right has mustard eyes? And then - *another sigh* - the "mummy" in the middle was a bit overly-mummified with my homemade biscuit dough, making it sort of difficult to eat. I should have really just bought the premade Pillsbury stuff that everyone else uses, but at least I knew exactly what ingredients were in these overly-puffy biscuits......Pillsbury next time, I think.....

The girls decided this pumpkin was like a spider. We melted crayons on it with my stamping heat tool. It was sort of a wild pumpkin day. When I brought them in at 8:00 a.m. to wash them up (they were muddy when we picked them out of the field), I noticed that this big guy was mushy on the bottom. Oh well, thought I. It'll still work for the crayon project even if we don't carve it. Yeah, well, Sunny was the first to notice the bugs crawling out of the pumpkin and all over our stove. Eeek!!!  Miss Mouse was totally unimpressed by her sister's willingness to squish the bugs and show them to her. Sunny was totally unimpressed with her elder's squeamishness. They make me laugh, but those bugs made me cringe. Yish. It was quickly transported to and decorated in the garage!

The smaller pumpkins were all rotten, too, but they weren't oozing bugs and so got free passes to stay inside for painting. This one above is Sunny's. She painted angels on it - one blue, two white, and one pink.

These teeny, tiny ones "belonged" to Mighty Mouse and "the baby in Mom's tummy". They were also decorated by melting crayons.

Miss Mouse painted hers with a bunny. I was pretty impressed!

Sunny had chosen to be a cowgirl the weekend before Halloween. She could hardly wait, especially once I mentioned that I'd let her pick one of my decorative wheat stalks and then hold it in her mouth. She was quite the cowgirl! She even talked with the stalk in her mouth through clenched teeth!

She was so happy and excited!

Once Sunny mentioned the cowgirl idea, I knew what I wanted Mighty Mouse to be! He was a pretty sweet little cowboy in his Carthart overalls, plaid jacket, and cowboy hat. He pulled in a real haul of candy for our "parents' candy fund" from his stroller.

Our sweet Miss Deadline - er, Miss Mouse - chose her costume at 1:30 p.m. on Halloween. At 1:00, she came to me asking if I could maybe make her a Statue of Liberty costume that she'd seen in a costume idea book. Um, well, not at that point! For several weeks prior, she had thought of being a "fat mouse" from the same book, which would have been fine with a few days' notice. A few hours for the Statue of Liberty, though? Not really going to happen. She's such a sweetheart, though, and rolls with whatever comes her way, so without even blinking an eye, she mentioned that maybe she could be a bumblebee. I jumped on it and started looking up face painting ideas for bumblebees. In the excitement we forgot her wings, but I think she still looked pretty obviously like a bumblebee. This girl makes me laugh with how very, very much like her Daddy she is - I know it would drive some people nuts with how much they depend on deadlines and how many directions their brains run in at one time, but they are two of the most gracious, flexible, kind, and understanding people I have ever been around. Such a lucky Mommy (and wife!) I am!  With a few days' notice, I could have picked up some cream face paint for her whole face to be yellow, but since she was fine with the little bumblebee designs I found to paint, I was happy with them, too! Nothing seems to really get this kiddo down for very long; she's always looking on the "bright side".   I was so thankful for another nice, warmish Halloween evening! It really helped her costume out to be able to see the yellow shirt and to not have to wear the skirt over a pair of snowpants!

Just thought I'd include one more Cowgirl picture with the garage door as the background. Just for consistency's sake so that all three have the garage-door-background-photo-op! And also because I just can't hardly get enough of that grin with the wheat stalk clenched in her teeth.

Mighty Mouse - 13 months; Miss Mouse - 6.5 years; Sunny - 4.5 years

You can't see this as well as I'd hoped, but I included this because of the goofy expression on Sunny's face. I just thought it was too cute! Notice the other two have not changed from the first photo.

Now this one I included because of the expression on Mighty Mouse's face. His pumpkin rolled away. Notice that now the other two have the same expression as the first photo. I can't believe I got even one with all of them looking non-goofy! 

As it turned out, it was a great thing that Mighty collected as much candy as he did. I had bought 15 packs of gum out at Sam's Club the other day, thinking that would be plenty since we'd never had more than 11 trick-or-treaters here ever. On Halloween day, I decided at the last minute to grab a bag of peanut butter cups at the grocery store. My real plan was to turn them into a leftover-Halloween-candy-cheesecake. Yum. Ah, but it was not to be. We had over forty kids stop by! That was great, except that 15 packs of gum plus 14 peanut butter cups does not equal a number over forty. The girls, once they were out of our "planned" treats, started giving out Mighty's treats. Once they were out of Mighty's treats, they announced that they'd just have to start handing out their own. It was very matter-of-fact, but it made me a little sad, even though it was probably a fine way to get rid of candy that will more than likely still be squirreled away somewhere in the house next Halloween (because I'm like that; I can only handle a few days of "two treats a day" before I squirrel them away and tell them they'll just have to be happy looking forward to my birthday cake; it's very convenient having a birthday so close to this holiday!). When the girls handed out a piece of candy each to two teenagers, I commented upon closing the door that if the next ones were teens, I was going to tell them whose candy they were really getting and ask if they REALLY wanted it. Well, when three teenaged girls showed up at the door, Miss Mouse looked at me with really wide eyes!  I quickly and quietly said, "I was teasing. I'm not going to say anything", but we turned our light off as soon as that group left.

For his part, Mighty decided it would be good to sample a candy wrapper from the floor, probably during a treat hand-out time since none of us noticed. Thankfully he did start gagging and puked it out.....all.over.me. That sort of thing terrifies me. Before he puked I had already started yelling for his Daddy who does the baby Heimlich manuever much better than I do. By the time Daddy arrived on the scene, though, he was in charge of puke cleanup.

Thank goodness for Daddy being home on Halloween this year! After the mummy sausages at lunch, take-and-bake pizzas for supper, a couple samples of the girls' candy, and just pregnancy in general, it would have been difficult for me to handle that episode by myself! I didn't mind cleaning up the little guy in the tub, but I was beyond thankful to have a partner to run the laundry down to the machine!

All-in-all we had another great Halloween. We mostly enjoy it as a day where we get to run around and visit neighbors who we otherwise hardly ever see. Maybe next summer we won't have had a yard fire and won't be building a shed and will perhaps be able to have a neighborhood picnic or something because it really is fun to stop and chat a bit with everyone!