it was still halloween

I almost dreaded last night. Halloween has been, for the past four years, one of my favorite days. A combination of parties and school events and neighborhood parades and, just, good friends living next door and up the street and around the corner, made Halloween in Charlottesville pretty unbeatable. So Halloween in New York, after out cancelled trip, well, I wasn't super enthused.
And it was different. It was not small town Halloween. At our sweet little neighborhood trick or treating we did not get candy from the folks in the liquor store. But when you live on a street full of doorman-less apartment buildings, you can't exactly walk up and ring a doorbell. Well you could, but it probably wouldn't go that well. So we went down to Broadway (hey, how many kids can say that they trick or treat on Broadway? Ok, so it's way up from that Broadway, but it's still Broadway) where the liquor store was feeling generous, the Hagen Daz was not, and the Presbyterian Church was set up as a haunted house complete with cobwebs and bat shadows coming from the belfry and remote control, ahem, I mean REAL ghosts flying around above us.
And the playgarden put on a nice little party with a haunted slide, candy, hot chocolate. and glowsticks, which are always the highlight of the night for my kids. Well, that and counting how many pieces of candy they have so they can sell them to me (ten cents a pop, Both kids are about $10 richer today).

It was nice. It wasn't our norm, but it was fun. Colder, darker fun, those few hundred miles between there and here make a big difference on when the sun goes down. But it will be fun to look back on "that Halloween we spent in New York", where someone dressed up as a giant cockroach and the lady making Hot Chocolate for everyone had been making it for Playgarden Halloween parties since 1968. Where every single girl in Evelyn's class dressed up as a butterfly, bee or ladybug and the prizes for fourth and fifth place in the best pumpkin contest were $20 gift certificates for espresso (in the kids category, who knows what the adults got!)

And despite living on a college campus, I only saw one inappropriate costume (but it was WAAAAY inappropriate. Let's just say it was so small that it revealed too much on both ends, but the kids were too busy conning the Cuban restaurant's bartender into giving them double candy to notice) and one slightly inebriated fray boy, who was nevertheless sitting out in front of his house dressed as one of the green squeaky men from Toy Story handing out candy. Come to think of it. I wonder it that was a hazing thing. Poor guy. We'll just pretend he was imbibing to ward off the chill.

(Not Really) Ready!

Well, I havne't cooked a single things for tonight yet. (Those are cute, yes, but the mummy dogs were an experiment a few weeks ago, sadly not sitting on my counter ready for tonight)
The house is, um, not a wreck, but not really what you'd call clean.

I'm down to one squirrel chewed pumpkin, everything else seems to have gone rotten in this weird humid weather we've had and

The President of the United States is speaking three blocks from my house at the same time as the party (no, I'm serious, he is!) which is sucky because I'd really like to go but people would probably notice if we weren't at our own party, right? Right?
Oh but I did come up with one (three) of those last minute projects that I knew would pop into my brain (at three in the morning, no less). Nice. But those shelves really did need painting. Honest. And it looks so much better in the kids room now. Or it will, when I put all the stuff that was on the shelf away now that the paint is dry.

Still, I have to say...
Totally excited! Halloween, here we come!
Woot! (I mean Arg!)

Have a safe one everyone!

Crafty Afternoon Fun

This week Briton doesn't have homework. At all. They are doing some kind of assessment in class which, I guess, means their brains are too friend by 3 to be taxed anymore. So they get a free week. Now I'm usually a big proponent of homework. Even when I'm explaining for the thirtieth time that if you would just DO the homework you'd be DONE with the homework, I still think it's a good thing. I've been known to give extra homework when folders and packets are "accidentally" left at school even. But that being said, it's been really, really nice to not have to deal with it this week. To have the afternoons filled with playing outside with friends and upstairs with sisters and just not having to make sure that the word problems have been solved two different ways and the spelling words are all correct. To just have time. Time to do something fun. Like make crayons.
Whoops, did I say make crayons? Ok, not really make make them, but melt them down into something more exciting than a stick make them.

Every year I try to have some little activity for the kids to work on at the Pumpkin Party. We've painted gourds and plastered stickers on pumpkins and made masks, standard Halloween party fare. But this year I decided to go simple and stick with coloring. For one thing it's usually the little kids who want to do the crafts, so coloring is a pretty good bet for fun there, but also, there are a lot more kids coming this year, so for the sake of economy, we're going with crayons.
OK, OK, I just wanted an excuse to play with hot wax and candy molds.
This afternoon, instead of estimation and word study and reading logs, Briton helped me sort two boxes of crayons by color, peel the paper off of the oranges and blues and purples (and a few pinks, because he's a good brother and knew someone would want a pink one) and broke them up to be melted in the double boiler.
Except the double boiler thing was taking forever, so really we just put the top of the double boiler straight on the stove (good thing that thing only cost 50 cents!) Once we had thing nice and melty, we poured the crayon wax into skull shaped candy molds so we could have fun, scary (well, scaryish, how scary can a pink skull really be?) crayons.

Obviously an adult should handle the hot wax but Briton was old enough to help steady the molds (which, by the way, are all of $1 at Michels at the moment - yay for procrastination!) and both kids had fun ripping apart the crayons. And now I'm envisioning all sorts of themed crayon fun...numbers, Christmas trees, lollipops to give people on April Fools Day....too mean? Ok, maybe not the candy ones then. :)

One Thing

Happy Monday my friends! I hope everyone had a lovely and relaxing weekend. I didn't quite get that weekend of nothing, but I did get some nice cozy cuddles from my kiddos, a preview into next weekend with our downtown Halloween Festival (too much candy already!), some good knitting time in and a quiet Sunday evening with a cup of tea and Mystery on TV so, you know, not bad. Not bad at all.
This Friday we are hosting our annual pumpkin carving party. It started as a way to get to know a few neighbors shortly after we moved in four years ago and has grown to, um, king of a big old shindig. I love it. It's probably one of my favorite days of the year. I get to make all sorts of foods, often from recipes I've had bookmarked for a while and have just been looking for a reason to try. (Like this or this or this - because I have an ice cream maker now - wheee! Or maybe something totally different). Pumpkins get carved, although generally ours get forgotten, friends we haven't seen for a while stop by, kids run around screaming. It's my kind of evening.

It's also the only time during the year that I buy Velveeta (because everyone loves grilled Velveeta sandwiches, even people who would never admit to it :))

I'm sure that later in the week I'll get into a dither about the party. Worry about having enough food or drinks or knives (interesting combination, I know, but it works for us) decide that something or other must be done before people come, despite the fact that most of the people who are coming have been here plenty of times, clean too much, sleep too little. But for now I'm just enjoying looking through recipes, thinking about the fun ahead. So this week my one thing is to continue that. To enjoy the week ahead pick the recipes to make, decorate for Halloween just a little more and finish Briton's costume, (er, I mean start and finish Briton's costume).
How about you? What are you up to this week? Doing anything special for Halloween?

**P.S. Can I just say my boy is a chip off the old crafty block! Since we didn't have his costume ready when we realized the festival was already underway he came up with that golfer get-up all on his own and in a matter of minutes. That's my boy!

One Thing
A new Monday habit. Share the one thing that you want to do this week, just for you. Click to enter below and link back to your blog so we can see all the fun things you do!
So, what will you be up to this week?

One Thing

Well howdy! The house tour is done (yay!) the upper parts of the house (the bits where we were too scared to get to on a ladder) are being painted by a professional, the car is back and the stomach flu is gone (fingers crossed) It's a good kind of day. In fact, it's a day to start digging out Halloween decorations.

With all that we've had going on the past month, I hadn't really woken up to the fact that it's OCTOBER. Which means that my second favorite holiday is coming up fast. Time to get the pumpkin party invites out to the neighbors, sew up some costumes (Briton is debating between a character from Harry Potter and Frankenstien at the moment, Evie has already decided on being a tutu wearing ladybug - who knows) and woo-hoo, get the Halloween decorations out of the basement.

One of the best parts of being a craft writer is that I get to make things like Halloween decorations for work. Of course, the flip side is that I was making most of them in August, so I have to dredge up what I did, what I wanted to do but didn't get to and what I have from last year to get my Halloween spirit on. But since I do so love Halloween I'm going to drag my brain away from Christmas and New Years (which is what I'm working on now) and shift back into spooky time.

So this week my one thing is to get my house Halloweened up. This little project is already out because it was my favorite craft in the past few months, so fun and so simple.... which is how all the best project are, really.

What are YOU up to this week? Anything fun?


One Thing
A new Monday habit. Share the one thing that you want to do this week, just for you. Click to enter below and link back to your blog so we can see all the fun things you do!
So, what will you be up to this week?

Halloween

Well, all I can say is it's a good thing that I have great friends in the neighborhood who will photograph my children for me wen they are running around like banshees with their friends, because I hardly even saw the Bat all night and the Mouse didn't hold still much either. Ahhhh the sugar, ahhh the fun.





At least Evie didn't barge into someone elses house and try to go to bed like last year.....