Thursday 31 October 2013

The Great Halloween Fiasco of 2013

I'd like to lodge a complaint  with the Fates regarding the quality of my  Halloween.  You see, I started working as a classroom teacher after being MIA from the profession for a scandalous number of years. Now I'm trying to play "catch-up" buy putting in 60+ hours a week at school.  Luckily, hubby has valiantly been holding down the home-front, cleaning, cooking and jetting kids around to their various locations in my absence.

This year, (due to my inattentiveness of what's going on at home), the kids decided to MAKE their Halloween costumes.  Logan was going to be this incredible aluminum-plated robot while Hannah planned on being an ultra cool, morphing-before-your-very-eyes Dragon Girl.  We argued about the wings, as I wanted  store bought and she insisted she could MAKE better dragon wings than the ones in the store (and she DID too)!  The rub was trying to get them to attach to her body, which I solved quite neatly at the last moment. Go me.  We painted her skin (and my trousers) with green Kool-Aid but it was so insufferably itchy she had to shower it off and go as a sorceress (see last year's Halloween picture and subtract the bat ears).  Logan actually got his costume to work all the way across the street to the neighbor's house before he had to ditch it because walking around in a box with dryer vent arms is actually a painful way to die.   *sigh*  And of course, the neighborhood Halloween party is ending 40 minutes from the time the kids finally don their (store bought) back-up costumes.  I'll be honest.  I told the kids that I had bought a large bag of candy and if they decided to stay home, we'd just split it up between them...which makes me Halloween Scrooge.   As we're pulling out of the driveway, our dog is seen wandering the streets (he went to see the neighbors too).  Giving up entirely, I bailed from the car and sent the family on ahead while I nabbed the dog.

OH, and one more thing...I  want a refund on the  two large pumpkins I bought to make into traditional Jack-o-lanterns...they're nothing but deer fodder.  I wasn't home to micro-manage the affair, as custom would dictate, so things went horribly, horribly wrong.  Logan's first attempt at carving a wicked-good design was a fail; resolutely, he  attempted to carve the OTHER side, which somehow ended up worse than the first try.  That  was just too much disappointment for one nine-year-old boy on Halloween to bear and he came in crying.  We doctored it, praised his knife wielding abilities, and put it out front.  Unfortunately,  amidst the costume craziness,  we failed to light it.  Great...now we're facing being plagued by spirits for the rest of the year for failure to observe Standard Halloween Protocol.
Last year's costume.

I call him, Tragic Pumpkin