Halloween 2012

We parties hard this Halloween season. Between the Harvest Festival/Carnival at school and the Harvest Festival/Chili Cook-off (not trunk or treat) at church, an adult Halloween party for Brian and I and then actual Halloween night, we are all sugared up and partied out!

 This year Ashlynn made her costume. She saw an idea for a Book Fairy and has been talking about it all year. So with the pages of a book, she made herself a tutu...

 ...and used the cover for wings, she had herself a costume (after adding her own touches of stripes, sparkles, curls, leopard print and glow sticks).

 The boys were easy this year. Digital Dudz. done. Thank you Uncle Mark. They were a hit!

 The balloons behind them were filled with glow sticks, but even when the sun went all the way down, the street light was still too bright to make them glow much. I still think it looks fun, though. I may use this design in the future, only with more balloons and LED lights. When you work with glow stick, you're dealing with an expiration date.

This was the Digital Dudz shirt I wore for the 2012 Halloween season. It was cool. And yes, people stared at my chest all night. Not sure how I feel about that.

Halloween 2011

From November 1, 2011

I kind of took the month of October off from blogging. My stake set a goal to index 1 million names in the month of October. Indexing is something you do on the Family Search website. Basically you are taking scanned documents and creating a database of those records to better facilitate genealogy work. It was a pretty exciting to be a part of the project. Together, Brian and I indexed just over 10,000 names!

Sooo, basically any time I sat down at the computer I felt like I should be indexing, not blogging. So here's some catch up.

As usual...

Ty requested an Angry Birds costume, so this is what I came up with. It was pretty basic fleece and felt sewing. And instead of a winter coat this year, I'm just going to make him wear his bomb bird, cause this thing was toasty warm!

From November 1, 2011

From November 1, 2011

Briggs decided he wanted to be an iPad.

No, not a person with a gaping hole in their torso, just a regular old boring ipad.The folks at Kinkos who printed and laminated our "apps" for us where not happy with me. They told me I had signed a waver saying none of the printed material was licensed art work (which it obviously is..) I told them my 8 year old wanted to be an ipad and what were they going to do about it?

Nothing. They thought that was pretty clever of my 8 year old to want to be an ipad.(But not as clever as looking like you have a gaping hole in your torso...)

From November 1, 2011

From November 1, 2011

And then there's our lady bug. The package with this costume was waiting for us when we got home from Amanda's wedding. Ashlynn rushed to open the package while the rest of us were unloading the car from a 1,700 mile trip. She immediately put the costume on and started buzzing around the house. I swear I caught a glimpse of my 4 year old girl who used to come home from preschool and slip into something more comfortable.

This is for my mom. She asked the kids to tell me to put Halloween pictures up on the blog.
So here they are!
Briggs was easy this year. All I had to buy was a $2.00 pair of handcuffs to complete his policeman's esemble.
Ashlynn's costume, of course, was a little more involved. She's really into reading the Percy Jackson books, so Greek Mythology was on her mind. So I give you, the Greek Goddess (she wanted me to get her a pomegranate to carry around so that she could say she was Persephone - I told her that was too much). Her costume had to be hand made from scratch - which we managed to do for under $15 dollars. She made the headband all by herself, while I had to rely on a tutorial from V & co. to ombre- dye the bottom of the dress. "Why couldn't the dress just be all white?" you might ask. To which I would reply, "This is Ashlynn we are talking about. Everything must me authentic."
And Ty.

His motivation behind this "Sheriff- gone- bad" costume was the gun. He wanted a costume he could carry a gun with so that he could say, "Happy Hands-up!"

This picture proves he has the squinty-eyed bravado every wild west bandit needs ( and the eyebrows...).

Larry, the singing dancing skeleton, is a big hit with the neighborhood kids.

When Brian and I first got married it became apparent very quickly that we were incompatible when it came to one thing...

Holiday decorations.

You see, Brian grew up in a home and a neighborhood where everyone decorates like its Disneyland. There is literally bumper to bumper traffic in his neighborhood during the holidays because the lights are so awsome.

I grew up in a home where we usually had a Christmas tree, but it was always nailed straight into the floor. That's right, straight through the carpet and into the wood floorboards. (We obviously didn't want to be bothered with picking it up and redecorating it every time it fell down!)

So when Brian asked, "Aren't we going to decorate?" my perfectionism resisted. What?! I have to plan and coordinate decorations for every holiday!? What if it's not perfect?

So I came up with a plan.

"Brian. You do it."

So he did.

Then comes Ashlynn. And bless her little soul, if she didn't inherit Grandma Caroline’s gift for decorating. When the first of October rolls around, I can always count on her and her daddy pulling out the boxes of decorations I have accumulated over the years and “decking the halls”!

I find it a relief because I love the look of being festive, I just don’t want to have to make any decisions about how or where to put the festivity.

This year, I tried to help out with the decorating, though, and I’m pretty sure I’ve thrown everybody off (yeah, I’m starting to get puzzled comments from the neighbors). I don’t like scary things at Halloween because it scares my kids. So I chose “Nightmare before Christmas” style, and “decked the halls” with black, purple and orange for Halloween.



I used electrical tape to cover the red stripe in the candy canes.



This was Ashlynn's idea, to put Toot and Puddle, our ceramic pigs, with some fake pumpkins.