It has been one crazy weekend for us! It hit me hard this year that Halloween is really the “holiday” we celebrate most in this house. All during the month of October leading up to Halloween, we watch scary movies on the weekend. Fear Fest on AMC actually had some good ones this year. A lot of years finding horror movies is tough. We’ve always thought this was odd especially during October.
We usually go all out with the costumes hard too… Halloween is a budgeted expenditure because it can get expensive. LOL! The only thing that I don’t do really well is decorate the house. Although in general I’m not a very good decorator – even for Christmas. But with Christmas I always have the plan… decorations and the tree go up the day after Thanksgiving and come down the day after Christmas. But after this weekend, I realized that for our family, Halloween really is THE holiday in this house. So I think this year, I’ll scrounge the after Halloween sales and see if I can pick up some decent decorations at decent prices for next year. 🙂
Our weekend started off on Friday. Rick was home and Dan didn’t have school. So we took Dan to IHOP to get a Scary Pancake. IHOP was giving away one Scary Pancake on the 29th. Dan was happy. 🙂 Then we went off to Michaels (because I still didn’t have an activity for the kids party) and found some frames and bags – and stickers… all at a decent price too. The frames were only $1.00 each and most of the stickers were already reduced so they could get rid of them. We made out very nicely.
So the girls came home at noon and I spent some time putting together a quick pasta shells recipe in the crock pot for an easy dinner. By 1pm or so it was time for a dry-run on Jessica’s wig/make-up. I think this was the first indication that maybe we do celebrate Halloween more than other families. LOL! Who does a dry run like that?! I just wasn’t sure how I was going to handle her wig and I didn’t want to be scrambling right before we walked out the door.
Around 4:30ish, everyone got dressed up and we took some marvelous photos outside! I love how they came out…
Then it was time to chase Dan…
And this brings us up to Fall Fest… The girls left around 6:00pm to head over to the school to work Fall Fest with the girl scouts. They sold pizza and water and made some charity money. 🙂 I don’t have many photos of the night because Dan had some “momma issues” right off the bat so he pretty much stuck by me like glue for the night and didn’t want to play any of the games. I did get some photos of him jumping with one of his friends at school in the moon jump.
So the night wrapped up and we went home to watch some scary movies… 🙂
On Saturday, we had two Halloween parties. Dan’s was at noon with a few kids from class and the girls was later in the afternoon. All the kids had a great time…. and I sure was tired by the end…
By this time, we needed a little time-out… so we watched The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. You’d think something like Snoopy would be safe… but at some point I had 5 little boys saying “He said stupid”, “stupid, stupid, stupid”, “he said the ‘S’ word”, “don’t say the ‘S’ word it isn’t nice.” LOL! Can’t win these days… but it was a good break for the boys – to rest and bring things down a notch.
We also made two crafts. The boys decorated Halloween bags and Halloween frames. They both came out great. The frames took a whole 10 minutes to decorate – when I was planning on 20 minutes… lol! oops! But with the bags, I made them sit at the table awhile longer… two hours can seem like eternity with five 5 year old boys.
After chasing the girls around the yard a bit more, all the little goblins went home with these goodies! I should have taken a photo of all the kids photo frames lined up but I completely forgot. 🙁 And I didn’t get any at the girls party – didn’t want to be an intrusive mom.
Okay… party 1 done… and it’s only 2pm on Saturday. Tired yet?
The girls party went much easier… I didn’t have to be involved all that much. The kids played spooky music and ran around most of the time. They decorated frames too and had pizza and cupcakes.
Everyone went home at 6pm and we watched some more scary movies. 🙂 End of Saturday. whew…
Sunday’s festivities started about 3pm…. getting costumes on again… the entire crew came over at 3:30pm and they all went trick-or-treating until 5pm. Rick and I took Dan out for awhile and then he passed out candy.
After the kids were done trick-or-treating around our house, we took them to see the Grandmas… got home around 7:30pm… watched some Ghost Hunters LIVE…and went to bed…. it was a LOOONG weekend. But the kids had a lot of fun… and so did Rick and I. 🙂
Blast from the Past…
This was the girls party when they were Dan’s age in 2005.
And Dan… well…wasn’t he a cutey?
He was even a hit at the party… probably the only time he’ll be the center of attention of 10 girls. LOL!
Hope your Halloween was a great one too!