As the kids get older and older, the days go by faster and faster. When they were babies, I often felt like the days dragged on interminably. I'd invent adventures to get us out of the house, or we'd just hang out, for days on end, with finger painting and the sandbox and cheese cubes and picture books. I was often lonely, often bored, but not always. Often, I was perfectly content to sit in the grass and watch my baby eating from a strawberry in each fist.
Now I feel like the days pass before I have time to take a breath. One kid wants to go to the library. The other kid has ballet. One kid has a highly rigorous outside class that has to be studied for every single day. The other kid has a sleepover, and then a birthday party, and then a playdate. There's an online class to set up for. There's French to study. A volunteer application to help with. An all-day workshop in another city that one of them has to be driven to, while the other is picked up from yet another sleepover and driven to yet more ballet and then taken to another birthday party.
September just flew by. So did October, and by next week November will be half gone. And once again, I didn't celebrate Halloween half as much as I wanted to. I didn't do every single family activity on my mental to-do list, didn't make every moment magical, didn't even get a photo of the little kid trick-or-treating, and next year the kids will be even older.
Ah, well. It was magical enough, I suppose:
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| The kids and I did have a Halloween-themed breakfast of mummy dogs, although I forgot to make the black ketchup to go with it. Red ketchup is just as spooky, fortunately! |
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| We could simply not find the time for our family tradition of a full Halloween feast, but my partner still managed to make us mummy meatloaf, and we ate it past 9 pm, because that's when everyone is finally back in the house after their evening extracurriculars. |
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| He also made the BEST Halloween cocktail, a vampire margarita. It's a regular margarita with red wine carefully poured on top. Isn't it gorgeous? And it tasted just as good! |
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| The little kid made her own costume from scratch this year--I'll take the extra expense of buying her fabric and a pattern for the pride that I feel watching her be so hard-working and creative. |
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| She's a very detail-oriented kid, and even cut a fallen tree branch into a big, wooden button, drilled holes into it, and sewed it to her cloak by hand, because that's just how she wanted it to look. |
The big kid worked really hard on her costume, too, this year. She got out her old Cadette vest, the whole family spent an evening watching Jurassic Park while drawing and coloring badges onto freezer paper, and we turned her into a Ghoul Scout, complete with plenty of Ghoul Scout badges:
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| I love these badges that the girls made to try to play on actual Girl Scout badges. The Archery badge is the best! |
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| My partner did these. |
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| These are my contributions! |
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| I LOVE the little kid's badges, especially the Day Camp badge that shows a Ghoul Scout eating a bear. Lol! |
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| Good skills for any Ghoul Scout to know! |
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| LOVE the dragon. |
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| We watched a bunch of ghoul makeup videos on YouTube, but I'm not sure how much attention Syd was paying, because she kinda went off the rails here. |
Oh, well. She IS very ghoulish-looking!
Confession time: the kids didn't carve their Jack-o-lanterns until THIS weekend.
The one thing we DID do, I suppose, is a flat-ton of trick-or-treating. It just kind of escalates every year. Every year the Greek organizations on campus do trick-or-treating the year before Halloween; we did that one year, and it was so fun we keep going back. So that's a bunch of candy. Up until the last minute we thought that the little kid was going to miss Halloween trick-or-treating completely because of ballet class, so we joined our friends for trick-or-treating at a state park the weekend before Halloween. Another bunch of candy. And then the kid's ballet instructor convinced the department to cancel pre-pointe class on Halloween night so that the ballerinas could trick-or-treat after all. Even more candy!
SO much candy:
We're still eating that candy, and the big kid already put back several pounds of it for making gingerbread houses next month. It's ridiculous, and yet that's what the kids were super into this year, so that's the source of their happy memories someday, so that's what we did.
MY happiest memory might be sitting on our bed, eating plates of mummy meatloaf off our laps, me with a bloody margarita, watching Doctor Who because they took Nightmare Before Christmas off of Netflix (grr!).
Here are my reminiscences of Halloweens gone by:
- Halloween 2017, when the big kid had the most amazing costume EVER even though I almost died helping her with it
- Halloween 2016, when I lived my dream and made us all Hogwarts uniforms
- Halloween 2015, when we made those ridiculous trick-or-treat cookies
- Halloween 2014, when the kids weren't even home with us!
- Halloween 2013, that blissful year when the kids made their own costumes
- Halloween 2012, when the hipster development in our neighborhood was finally finished and trick-or-treating got crazy awesome
- Halloween 2011, when the little kid dressed herself as a skimpy-on-top "leaf mermaid" and people kept asking her if she was cold
- Halloween 2010, the year that we threw a party!
- Halloween 2009, with a clown and a "baby deer"
- Halloween 2008, with the bunny and the zebra
The Halloween posts alone make mommy blogging worthwhile. Without this blog, I'd never remember so many sweet details from our families Halloweens throughout the past decade.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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