Halloween, Take One

DD, Poppa, me, and SI heading home with candy!

I wanted to be the awesome mom that built the coolest homemade costumes.  I wanted to be the mom that rocked out dinosaurs and dreidles and panda bears and stalks of broccoli.

The best laid plans of mice and men, right?

I thought I was kind of wimping out this year.  This year, I made my children ghost costumes.  You see, they LOVE ghosts.  They get very excited about ghosts.  And they love saying "BOO!" and scaring grown-ups.  Or at least, getting grown-ups to pretend they're scared.  So, I made them adorable ghost costumes.

Or so I thought.

It turns out that what I made were horrific torture devices,  contrived only to torment my helpless children with their ghostly terror.

They wouldn't go within four feet of those costumes without throwing a fit.

Halloween came.  Each attempt at turning my adorable children into adorable ghosts failed.  M valiantly tried his own technique, "Do you want to go trick-or-treating?  You have to wear a costume!  Daddy will wear a costume!  Let's go get into your costumes!"

Costumes, they were fine with that.  But not ghost costumes.  While my mother laughed and laughed at my fruitless attempts to wrangle my children into their shrouds, I gave up.  I needed to think fast.  We had little Flamenco dresses for the girls from my parent's last trip to Spain.  "Do you want to be Flamenco dancers?"  "NO!"  I was surprised, but not yet completely sunk.  "Do you want to be ballerinas?"  We had tutus that a friend had given them the previous year.  "NO!"  Well, no type of dancing was to be acceptable.  I glanced at the wall- a friend who worked at the Renaissance Fair had given them super cool fairy wings for their birthday.  "Do you want to be fairies?"  "Yes!  Fairies!"

Fine.

So I put my children in poofy dresses, attached wings to their backs, and stuck these adorable (and perfectly matched) caps made by Grandma onto their heads, and thus were the costumes completed.

My daughters were fairies.  And they went trick-or-treating for the very first time.  And they loved it.

But Halloween isn't over.  We've got a big to-do next weekend as well.  And now?  Now that they've seen lots of other children in Halloween costumes?  Now they want to be robots.

How badly do they want to be robots?  They're watching Wall-E for the FIFTH TIME in about 24 hours.

Let's see if I can put together some robot costumes in three days.  And let's see if they actually wear them.


And now.... pictures!!!

Heading off for some trick-or-treating!

Fairies dancing down the street

SI is one happy fairy!

With DD, that makes TWO happy fairies!

"I just say, 'Trick or Treat,' and they put candy in my bag?  Too easy!"

M (Thor for Halloween) and SI

Daddy and DD