Life's No Fun Without a Good Scare

Nothing is scarier than hearing these words: "Mom, will you help me make my costume?" Shudder! Puts fear into my heart just thinking about it. Especially since anything falling under the category of "arts and crafts" has never been my area of expertise.






To make matters more challenging, William wanted a homemade Dr. Octopus costume. Who, you ask? Yeah, that's what I said too. One google image search later, I had a clue. I had William go back to his room and sketch out what he wanted and how HE was going to make it work. I wanted a list of materials and a detailed plan about how realistically he could achieve his vision. I thought that would be enough to scare him off. It wasn't. After a trip to the Home Depot for supplies and with a week of time to complete the costume, Bill and I thought we had done our part. It was more complicated than any of us had imagined, and all of 3 of us had to revamp the plan and start again. Last night. At 9:00 pm. So he could have it ready to wear to school tomorrow. Yup, not for the faint of heart.

Romney's idea for a costume, I have some experience with. He wanted to be a "dust bunny". I really wanted to get him some bunny ears to go with his costume, but he was having NONE of that. I thought he was uber creative, until I found out that the "dust bunny" was a character in a Japanese Anime movie. The scary part of his costume, was the week and a half of black finger nails I had after spray painting enough batting to cover a small child and the fuzz that lived in my nose for longer than I care to remember. The good news is no one else will have costumes that look quite like theirs. The bad news: It is entirely possible that no one will know what they are. Still any year I don't have to construct an Atari console out of styrofoam and cardboard is a good year around here.

Another reason to be frightened, I had a minor Martha Stewart moment. (How would it be to be so crafty that the mere mention of your name brought forth vision of all kinds of homespun wonderfulness? Hmm... guess I will never know. And I am so ok with that.) I invited friends over quickly so that when the moment passed, I would still feel motivated. I had seen these little "pepper jacks" (as I like to call them) online and thought filling them with some yummy chili on a Halloween night would be "cute". Usually, that is as far as the idea to reality goes, but not this time, since I had already extended the invitation. That means the pepper jacks went from "a nice idea I had seen on the internet" to actual carved bell pepper "bowls".

We had a wonderful feast with friends and then let these hooligans loose on the neigh-
borhood. They were so excited to be together. It was like they hadn't seen each other for years, when in reality they rode to and from school in the same vehicles. An hour or so and several pounds of candy later, they returned to sort their loot. Favorite item: Halloween themed hand sanitizer. It had the word "chocolate" on the label, that counts, right?


Happy Halloween.