Halloween

We really don't get too much into Halloween here.  It seems like just another reason to spend a lot of money to me.  Our costumes have always been homemade.  SOme years we have trick or treated around town, others we have trunk or treated, one year we handed out candy, and last year we just went to the RV Parks halloween party(in balmy Florida-ahhh).

So October 31st arrived and I still hadn't given much though to what if anything we were going to do.  It had been a hectic month since we had been home and Halloween was pretty low on my priority list.

But at the last minute we decided to go around our new town.  So we threw together some costumes and headed out.

Snuggle Bug was a ninja, Bubba was a Red Box(he had a red square taped to his shirt and some DVD's sticking out of his pocket)-he is always one for the understated, witty costume, Sissy was a doe, Princess was a baker(she is holding a tray of play cookies), Little Miss was Sophia the First and Baby Girl was an Oompa Loompa.

Bubba and Sissy don't get to trick or treat anymore( our imposed rules that once you get taller than those handing out candy you have to stop) but they walk around with us as the little ones trick or treat.  I do buy them each a little bag of candy though so as not to totally miss out.

Snuggle Bug even made his own paper sword and paper ninja stars.  They were really impressive. And yes we had that black hood thing laying around(??). Little Miss already had her purple princess dress so I just drew and stenciled the white design that is on Sophia the First's dress on to it and bought her the crown at the dollar store. 

I was Green with Envy.  Get it??  I am wearing green and Hubby's name tag says "My name is Envy".

  Green. With. Envy. 

When you have 6 kids to get ready for last minute trick or treating that's all you have time to come up with. Cut me some slack.

I did Sissy's make up for her doe costume. Super easy. I just looked at a picture we googled. We bought a brown head band at the dollar store and Sissy used some brown material from home and tan paper from a paper bag to fashion the  ears.  It's amazing what you can do with hot glue isn't it? We bought a pack of pipe cleaners to form the structure of them. The headband was actually a Christmas reindeer one so we just pulled the antlers off.

I sprayed Baby Girl's hair green( can't really tell here though) and put on some orange face paint that we already had.  She has this super cute outfit that always reminds me of an Oompa Loompa so I just stuck some pants underneath it and went with it. She didn't actually trick or treat anyhow since she is allergic to dairy(aka- almost every candy).

It was nice to meet some of our neighbors and we finished the night off with some pizza which has always been our Halloween tradition. 

Many Blessings,

The Mama

Halloween Fun

It has been years since we did pumpkins.  We have been fortunate that the kids always do that with their grandparents on both sides of the family.

One reason is it gets expensive when you have 6 kids!

But I knew the kids really wanted to carve/paint pumpkins so I picked up some small ones.

Sissy free-handed this 

Snuggle Bug's is to the right and Bubba's to the left.

Yep. Bubba's is a big hole.

He says he wanted to leave it "open for creative interpretation". My interpretation is lazy ;)

The campground we are at here on the gulf had a Halloween party that we went to.  Everyone brought an appetizer to share and they had a DJ playing. 

Our kids were the only children there but they still had a good time. 

 The men and women at the party were like grandparents to them and gave them candy and doted on them.

They had a pumpkin contest and this was one of the entries(and the winner)!  Sissy entered hers too and it held it's own pretty well in the painted category. Snuggle Bug wanted to put his in but we encountered something we have never had to deal with back home in October: 

Heat

Even though he did his pumpkin the week of Halloween it was already shriveling up from the warm temperatures. 

I bought a small bag of candy for the kids(holy crap candy is expensive!) plus they had a bunch from a gentleman at the party.

This is the annual 'trading of candy'.  Lots of wheeling and dealing going on.

Baby Girl went as a Gumball Machine

I just got a piece of self stick black foam, glittery silver tape and pompom balls. That is a newborn hat but the only stocking hat I had to glue the balls onto!  That's why it is so small on her. I cut out a circle out of poster board and drew a quarter on it as I carried Baby Girl around.

Little Miss was a princess (of course)

She loved getting her hair and make-up done.

Twirling

Bubba was an 'Aircraft Carrier'

Snuggle Bug was a Mad Scientist

He had me draw crazy eyebrows on him and we all couldn't stop staring at him.  He looked so different!  His eyebrows are so light colored that you can't really see them normally.

Princess went as a tea bag.

They had tickets that were handed out for door prizes.

Two of our tickets got drawn for a free caricature drawing!

We also won 4 door prizes( 2 decorative pumpkins,a necklace and a set of candles).

And Sissy was Katniss Everdeen(her bow was on the table during this picture).

The party was 7-9 but the Notre Dame game started at 8pm.  Luckily, the TV room in the clubhouse was right by the party.  So the guys watched the game and us ladies joined them once the party was over.  The wonderful ladies at the party even brought in a bunch of leftovers for us to nosh on during the game.  Such sweethearts!

Most of those at the party were 60+ but they sure can have a good time!

Sissy said,"Man!  I never knew old people could party so hard!"

You think she would have already realized that after being around her 

grandparents  for so long! 

 Ha!

Many Blessings,

The Mama

Trick or Treat, Mercury Levels, and a Fire

Finally heard back from the Dr's.  Actually I called them.  Both of the girls mercury levels were with in normal range!  Praise God!  Thank you for the prayers!

We decided for the first time to hand out candy for Halloween this year.  The kids were still able to dress up and since the weather was FRIGID( 40mph winds with wind chills in the 20's and snow), they were very ok with not going door to door.  Actually we have a policy at our house that once you become a teenager you can no longer go door to door.

We also don't buy costumes, we always make them.  But we did buy one on sale for Little Miss because it cracked us up so much!  And I bought one for like $2 after Halloween a few years ago that Princess wore.

So here are some of their costumes.  See if you can guess them all:

Ice Cream Cone 

Did you guess it?

Quarterback

The most natural Cleopatra ever.

How about this one??

Lineman!

We have a football theme going with most of our costumes.

How are you doing guessing? 

Her shirt says Ceiling at the top if you can't see it.

And that is a pom pom she is holding.

So that makes her a...

CEILING FAN!

And just what every 34 weeks pregnant women needs-

A bright orange shirt to call attention to her belly.

My shirt says:

Go To Your Room!!

So what am I?

30 points to you if you know it.

Anyone??

Ok fine.  I am "Intentional Grounding".

There's the football theme again.

We were all loving the witty costumes this year.  And so easy and cheap to make. Bubba taped a dollar to each ear last year and was a Buccaneer( get it?  Buck an Ear) which is what got all of us on this kick. 

That brings us to our fire

You know, because our lives aren't exciting enough.

The really bad part is that this happened at night after an entire day of cleaning the house to get it ready for a showing this morning.  Talk about a Halloween horror.

Our fireplace isn't operable but we wanted to try out those great gel fuel can things.  So we put a small one in and it worked great!  We thought it would be perfect for our showing.

It worked a  little too great for our set up as the flame was higher than we wanted.

So we tried to put a lid on it to smoother it( per instructions), but as we were doing so the can tipped.

This presented 2 problems:

1. Our fireplace goes all the way down into the basement where they had a place for all the ashes to go and they could clean them out( back in 1900).  So when it tipped it went down into the grating.  Into our basement.
2. Way up in the chimney there were some old newspapers someone had stuffed up there many a moon ago( to stop drafts??).  When the can tipped there was a big flare up.  And all those old, dry papers caught on fire up in the chimney.  And the chimney no longer vents to the outside.  It was cut off at the roof line and ends in the attic now.

Oddly enough, I just told the kids on Weds. where our fire extinguisher was and went through a tutorial and how to use it.  So when we put the fuel can into the fireplace, Bubba got the extinguisher right away, just in case.

He was the one that spotted the flaming newspapers way up in the chimney.

So Bubba sprayed the extinguisher and then Hubby sprayed again a few seconds later when we could still see some flames.

It wasn't until we started seeing something billowing out of  near the ceiling where our pocket doors are in the adjoining room that we started to worry that the fire may not be contained after all.

We also noticed that our room which is directly above the foyer/fireplace was also smoky.

We immediately called the fire department and got everyone out of the house.  I had to wake Little Miss up, a couple of kids just had socks on.  I did have them grab blankets as they ran from the house because as I have already stated up in the Halloween portion of this blog, it was frigid outside.

We had a couple of kids crying and we all went into the trailer to be warmer and then eventually into a neighbors house.

The fire dept. checked the walls for hot spots and found nothing.

It was likely just all the fire extinguisher powder billowing out of the crack and crevices everywhere in the other rooms.

We were so relieved!!  

And then we had the mess in the pictures above to deal with.  

BUT...

Fire extinguisher powder is much simpler to clean up then a broken light bulb! Sissy pointed this out.

The powder is just gets everywhere.  And the picture just capture a small frame of the mess.  The powder found it's way around the entire main level and up into the 2nd floor via the stairwell.Not to mention our house smelled like, well, it caught on fire.  Odd right??  

At 2:30 we finally hit the hay and had to be up at 7:30 to get ready for a church event. I was so sore from all the cleaning yesterday though and didn't go.  I still got up and gave the floors another mopping and wiped everything down again.

I really can't complain too much though.  Our house could have burned down or we could be dealing with water and smoke damage.  I will take fire extinguisher powder any day! 

And our showing went fine this morning.  The potential buyer looked at a few houses this morning so don't know what she thought of the rest.  Her fiance had something come up and couldn't come along today so we are simply hoping for a 2nd showing.  

Maybe by then I can get all the powder cleaned up and the house will smell better!

Many Blessings,

The Mama