Dressing Up

My kids love to dress up in costumes. I love to dress up too, and I always have. I don't have that many great Halloween memories from my childhood because my mom never really decided whether or not our family would celebrate Halloween. I never knew from year to year if we would or not. I remember always being very disappointed on the years we didn't do anything. For that reason, I let my kids dress up and go trick-or-treating. We talk a lot with the kids about the scary things we see in the stores and in some people's yards at this time of year. We choose fun, light-hearted costumes. And we reach out to the people in our community. This year required two costumes for Snapper and three for Pepper. We couldn't manage to double up. But it worked out great because I was able to make everything. I bought the material on sale so it hardly cost me any money at all! I think the grand total for 5 costumes was $22!

Wednesday was Bible Character night at Awana. Snapper dressed up as the tree in Psalm 1, and somehow I managed to not get any photos of her. Bummer! Pepper was Moses from John 3:14. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up. Pepper had recited that verse at Awana the week prior, so the timing was perfect.

On the 30th, our church hosted Trunk or Treat for the community around the church. We did an Angry Birds themed trunk. The kids wore their Halloween costumes and we all had a blast. Snapper chose to be a parrot this year because she knew my friend Tracie's little ones were going to be pirates. Snapper thought it would be funny to be the parrot carrying around the pirate.

Book Character day at school landed right on Halloween. All the kindergartners and 1st graders dressed up as their favorite book characters. Pepper was Brother Bear from the Berenstain Bears series.

And then tonight was Halloween. Originally we had planned on spending the evening with friends in another part of town. But Pepper and I were sick late last week, and I just didn't feel up to going anywhere tonight. We stuck close to our house and took the kids trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. We live in a lovely neighborhood, so it was really pleasant being out this evening. We walked around the beautiful lake that is a block down our street and the kids got a lot of candy from the gorgeous, lakefront homes. It rained all day and cleared up around 4:00, so it was nice and cool and the air had a wonderful, fall-ish, wet leaf smell. We walked around for about an hour, and then came home to hand out candy. Matt set up a table with coffee and cocoa, and we took advantage of the BOGO candy at Publix to make sure we had enough. We had been hoping to meet some of our neighbors this way. To our disappointment, we only got 3 trick-or-treaters. To my delight, we finished the night with 4 monster bags of candy left over, and a whole container of pumpkin spice creamer! It was a very fun week. 

Now we begin the countdown to Thanksgiving in earnest. We're looking forward to spending that weekend at a friend's beach house in the Florida Keys with our wonderful friends Brad, Kathy, and Vonette. And then Christmas is right around the corner! I've made great progress on my Homemade Christmas challenge, but I still have a lot to make. Can you guess how I'll be spending the 55 days until Christmas?