Happy Halloween 2012

Happy Halloween everyone!
Halloween is such a fun holiday. I really like the dressing up and pumpkin part of Halloween, but I'm not nearly as thrilled about the blood, gore and scary violent part. Mr. Q and I delivered a bunch of flyers for a bottle drive we did earlier this month for the food bank, and passed some decorations that were really terrifying for him. There are so many freaky decorations out there. Maybe not freaky for me, but what 2 year old isn't going to be terrified of some scary werewolf creature with bloody fangs and claws reaching out for him. I'm sure people just don't think about little munchkins having bad dreams.
Anyway...
We had a fantastic time getting ready for Halloween this year. The kids always get so excited about carving pumpkins for Family Night, but then they are so chicken to touch the guts.

Fun times.

 Miss A actually touched a couple of seeds, so she is getting braver than in past years.

 Miss C was happy to scoop out the seeds, but she really wasn't interested in grabbing them at all. After her big sister touched a seed, she also tried touching the icky insides.

 The kids wanted out pumpkin to have scary teeth. I'm not sure if we were successful on that one, but we sure had a blast attempting it.

I made this pumpkin & brought it to my Zumba class last night. I think I'll take it again tomorrow to get one extra night out of it. Matt's fancy wood carving tools get pulled out every year at Halloween. So glad they get some use at least once a year.

Miss C dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood this year.

 What a cutie!

 Mr. Q was a beggar/homeless man. I needed a quick and easy costume for a party we went to on Friday at Galaxyland, and that's what we came up with. There is definitely something to be said for costumes that don't require a lot of work.

 Miss A was a ladybug. She kept telling me that she dressed up as a coccinelle. That's French for ladybug. She loved her painted-on eyelashes best.

I'm sure she's going to love playing with real makeup when she's older.

We took the kids trick-or-treating down our block and one small cul-de-sac. We left at 7 and got back at 7:30 or so. We passed 26 houses and of those, only 10 or 11 had their lights on. They got enough candy. I was glad they didn't come home with pillowcases full like my siblings and I used to when we were kids.

They were in their glory. I can remember, as a kid, laying all of my candy out and seeing how much of each type I got. I showed them my methods. I'm such a weird-o.

I love how Mr. Q's beard is being washed away by candy drool here. lol

Hope you all had a fantastic Halloween!

Viking Obsessed

I feel like I've been viking obsessed for the past couple of weeks getting ready for Halloween. Last year Miss A said she wanted to be Astrid from How to Train your Dragon for Halloween. I thought it would be a really cute, not quite so typical costume & then thought it would be fun for us all to dress up as vikings. Miss C wants to be the same as her sister, as usual. I thought about dressing up Mr. Q as a dragon, but decided to just stick with the viking theme.
Twice a year I go to this garage sale type of thing in St. Albert called the Share & Wear at the Alliance church. For the last couple of years, I have also volunteered at the event as well. It has been a great opportunity to help out the community and I get a lot of great clothes for my family there as well. There are areas for children, baby, ladies, & mens clothes, coats, toys, books, etc. set up and all the donations have to be sorted as they come in the door. This year, I wasn't able to help on the day of the event, so I went the night before to help with sorting. We sorted from 5:30-8 and then the organizers let us go through and "shop" for a few minutes before they closed the doors. I wasn't able to find much for clothes this year. I found lots of cute things, but they were in all the wrong sizes. Oh well, that's the way things go. On my way out, I looked at the coats and found a few coats that I thought would really make our viking costumes fantastic. I wish I took some before pictures, but I didn't think of it until too late.
Here's a picture of Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon, beside my little cuties.

Their shirts came from an XL size womens shirt that I refashioned into 2 smaller shirts. My sewing skills are not the greatest, but you can't really tell from a distance. Hahaha.
I cut the skirts out of a couple of the coats from the Share & Wear. I just put velcro on the ends and it wraps around & sticks together. The boot covers are from one of the same coats. I just cut off some of the fake fur, and sewed it in a cylinder. They just slide them on their legs before they put their boots on and then tug them down. The shoulder armour was made with craft foam & hot glue. Man, hot glue is amazing!
We made the skulls and spikes out of Crayola Air Dry Clay. We molded them and then let them dry and the girls painted them. Getting them to stick on the skirt was a challenge. We first tried hot glue. They fell off so quickly. I decided to try sealing the spikes with Mod Podge first. I tried hot glue again. Still didn't work. We tried Gorilla Glue next and that seems to work the best, though the glue bubbled out and you can see it around most of the spikes. Whatever. I still think it looked great!

Here's Mr. Q. in his costume. My brother's girlfriend Sarah crocheted the "helmet". Amazing!! She is really talented.
Matt and I also had costumes, but they were not nearly as extravagant. Of course, I don't have any pictures. Hope everyone had a Happy Halloween!

A glimpse through our spooky windows...

After Halloween last year, I bought some spiderwebs in the clearance area at Superstore, and miracle of all miracles, I actually remembered I had it! Last night, I thought it would be fun to decorate the house with the kids, so we got to work creating monster window decorations, while Matt had a night out building something with one of his friends.I stole the idea from a friend of mine, Niki.

We used sheets of black poster board (which happened to fit in our windows perfectly!) and tissue paper from my wrapping/gift bag stash.  The poster board was 2/$1 at the dollar store, so the total cost was $4.50.

 We had a blast doing it. The kids kept pretending the hanging monster with the arms was going to grab them, and they'd squeal and run away. Too cute! They were especially happy that I let them stay up late to see how they looked from outside after dark.

Since I last posted, we had Miss A's 5th birthday. She wanted to have a makeover party, so we invited a few of her friends from school and had a great time. Here's her invitation:

Seven little girls showed up. The thought crossed my mind to invite all the girls in her class, but I decided that I'd probably go insane, especially if parents came and brought younger siblings... my house is not very big!

I couldn't really think of any traditional games that had anything to do with makeovers for the girls, but I came up with a few weird things that went over pretty well. First I put a dollop of Vaseline on the girls nose and they had to get cotton balls to stick to them. Miss A refused to do that one because she hates being dirty, and Vaseline is sticky. She is definitely Matt's daughter. I found these super long straws at the dollar store. I put a bowl full of water and dish soap inside a big plastic bin, the girls had to blow the straws until they filled the whole bin with bubbles. Then, I had a few balloons and the girls had to use a hair dryer to blow the balloons into a laundry basket tipped on its side. The bubbles was by far the most popular of the games.

My wonderful stylist friend Jen agreed to stay at the party to help me with the hair and nails. We put hair bling in the girls hair, as you can almost see in the photo of Miss A, and painted their nails. We also stuck a little jewel to most of their nails, but those didn't last too long. I was happy that the kids managed to keep their hands glued to the table until their nails were dry, for the most part, and I didn't have to deal with any nasty nail polish mishaps. I'm grateful for those cheap plastic tablecloths.

 The cake was a sad story. I stayed up until 4:30am and the fondant was a nightmare. My first batch had to be thrown out at 11:30pm, due to the paddles on my Bosch mixer exploding into shards through the fondant. My poor Bosch. I went ahead and made my second batch. For some reason, that batch never got to the right consistency probably due to an overtired-not-thinking-straight error on my part. Overall, it was a heartbreaking mess. Finally at about 4am, I decided I gave up and threw the ugly, bumpy, crumbly fondant on the cake and called it a night. It was supposed to look like a bottle of nail polish. Not one of my best cakes, that's for sure. Oh well, at least I tried.

 We were able to go to Saskatchewan for Thanksgiving and also for my great grandma Dorothy Palmer's 100th Birthday party. Her birthday isn't until next month, but you don't want to put off a party for this occasion too long. It was nice to be able to go and see her, though she doesn't remember us anymore due to Alzheimer's. Almost all of her descendents were able to be there.
Great grandma Dorothy lived a block down the street from me when I was growing up. I can remember watching the ants on the  peonies that lined the front of her home. I used to push our lawn mower to her house to mow the grass for her. I always remember her front room had bright red carpet and all sorts of trinkets that we weren't allowed to touch. She's a hard worker. She still washed her own floors (probably on her hands and knees) when she was 90. Grandma Dorothy hated wastefulness, and has a sweet tooth like no other. She had a tin foil collection in a drawer in the kitchen. Before the Alzheimer's struck, she had a great memory for peoples names and birthdays and who they married. I didn't inherit that trait, but my grandma sure did. Grandma Dorothy is a great woman whose legacy will last long beyond her time here. She only has one daughter, 5 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, I think there are 23 great-great grandkids (my kids fit here), and I know there are some great-great-great grandchildren now too.

Thanks for everything, Great Grandma Dorothy! We love you!