The Bean Blog

Hobos and ghouls and army men…oh my

Nov 1, 2009 In the holiday spirit

I’ve talked before about how Halloween is not my favorite holiday. It’s too commercial. It’s too expensive. We always end up eating way too much candy. And then we’re all groaning about stomach aches. What’s the point?

And yet every year I find myself hiking through the neighborhood watching my kids beg for candy anyway. And every year I have to practically drag them through the last couple blocks because their “feet are tired” or their “candy bag is too heavy.” *sigh*

But this year I tried to be more of a willing participant. Get in to the spirit and all. I told myself we only have a couple more Halloweens left before the kids won’t want me to take them trick-or-treating anymore. Only a couple more years until they are driving themselves to their friends’ Halloween parties and leaving me behind.

We didn’t go to the pumpkin patch this year. Instead we did something even better. We grew our own pumpkins. Ok, so we didn’t really plan that. It just so happened that our procrastination from last year gave us a big surprise this year. Saying “we’ll throw the rotten pumpkins away tomorrow” every day for several weeks caused the rotten pumpkins to fall off the porch and plant their seed in the grass in front of our house. Then when a big viney weed looking thing started growing in the yard this September I said, “I’ll pull out that weed next weekend” until I had procrastinated so long that pumpkins began to grow on that vine. So the moral of this story is…Procrastination pays. Keep putting off today what may turn in to a wonderful surprise tomorrow.

It made it a little more special to carve pumpkins we actually grew ourselves. In fact this was the first year the kids did most of the work. They picked out their designs. They poked the holes in the pumpkins to mark where to cut. And they helped Lee and I cut out the pieces.

Look at how big our homegrown pumpkins are! Clearly it doesn’t take much to grow pumpkins if my green thumb can grow a couple of ginormous pumpkins.

As in the past, the kids had Halloween parties at school. The last couple of years they’ve had a Halloween parade. All of us parents pile in to the gymnasium and the kids from Preschool to 5th grade parade through the gym. It’s a lot of fun to see all of the very cool costumes. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz seemed quite popular with the girls. And military fatigues were quite popular with the boys (including Caleb).

I even dressed up for the school party. I was a witch in the school colors (orange & black…comes in handy on Halloween). The kids were a little freaked out by my black lipstick, but all was good. Spencer was some kind of ghoul (but he got out of his costume before this pic), Skyler was a hobo and Caleb was an army guy.

The school party was fun, but you weren’t allowed to wear face makeup or have weapons. So we really did it up for Halloween night. Spencer got his ghoulish mask and black face paint on. We dirtied up Skyler’s face for the ultimate hobo look. And Caleb finally got to carry around his toy gun (which he broke 2 days before Halloween even though we said “Don’t play with that until Halloween so you don’t break it” — kids never listen). And I switched in to an undead widow wig and makeup (or Little Ho Peep as Lee liked to call it).

I hope you all had a great Halloween and got tons of candy. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go get a snack. And some Mylanta.

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Tags: army, candy, costume, ghoul, Halloween, hobo, military, NaBloPoMo, pumpkin patch, pumpkins, undead widow, witch