Halloween 2016

Oh Halloween, we love Halloween! It's just so much fun to dress up and trick-or-treat and generally have a good time.

This year Charlie wanted to be Mario, and Emmett wanted to be Blue Toad--NOT Red Toad. He was quite adamant. I made their costumes at the last minute, as per usual, but I think they turned out pretty great.

Now, I can't take all the credit for the costumes; Chad and I are a magical team. It all begins with the boys choosing who they want to be. Then Chad takes us to the dollar store where we inevitably find something incredibly helpful.

This year's dollar store find is the plastic army hat hidden within Emmett's toad hat. Until we saw it, we just weren't sure how we'd pull that off. But we saw it and then the ideas came. Here's what we did: we took a big piece of white fabric, cut it into a circle, and painted big blue dots on it. Then we attached the edge of the circle to the inside of the army hat while we slowly and carefully stuffed the hat with plastic Walmart bags. I checked the craft store and real stuffing was WAY too expensive. This worked beautifully.

The next challenge was the Mario hat. At one point we decided to just buy it, but all the costume Mario hats looked stupid, and I really wanted it to be a baseball hat. So I started searching online, but everything came with mixed reviews. So we gave up on the buying it option and started searching craft stores for plain red baseball hats (which were not the right price online). No luck at JoAnn's. No luck at Hobby Lobby. We were going to tape a paper emblem over a red Raising Cane's hat that we have when I remembered Micheal's. Ironically, it's the craft store nearest my house. And lo and behold they had plain red baseball hats for about $3. Frabjous day! Then we bought a small piece of white felt and hot glued a circle with an M cut out. This worked beautifully, too.

I'm really happy with how the costumes turned out, and I couldn't have done it without Chad's clear head, resourcefulness, creativity, and reassurances. He's the best.

The last several years, we've trick-or-treated in my parents' neighborhood. But this year my mom was out of town and my dad wasn't going to be home during trick-or-treating hours, so we decided to do something different. We traveled from our house south stopping at the streets where our family and friends live. It was a fun way to trick-or-treat and see some of the important people in our lives.

While I really enjoyed it; if we do it again, we'll have to plan ahead a little better. Emmett was so tired by the time we got home that he wanted to go straight to bed without eating dinner. It's a good thing we all had so much fun!