This is Halloween, This is Halloween!

G outgrew her skeleton shirt this year and passed it down. There may or may not have been tears. And L may or may not have been protesting her sister photo bombing her picture here (And I may or may not be hiding in my room eating all their candy!).

This was the first year we allowed the bigs to carve their own pumpkins. They've always drawn the design and we, or I, have then spent hours cutting out 7 pumpkins. Fortunately they chose nice small pumpkins for their first try. 

 And it was a success! I will never carve 7 pumpkins in one night again! J just kept saying how pleased she was with herself and M obviously felt pretty good about her efforts too!

And you can never forget G. 

 So with that idea of doing less, or attempting to for the first time in my life, I BEGGED and BEGGED and PLEADED and BEGGED the kids to not need to have family themed costumes this year so that we could maybe just re-use some of the previous ones or even just dig into the dress-up box and not spend a dime, but they would not be moved. They even got together and agreed on a theme when I, seeing my last hope, declared that there would be no family theme if everybody wasn't on board. So MarioKart characters it was. However, I swore off making the karts. If they wanted karts, that was all up to them. There were quite a few hours spent cutting, taping, and painting cardboard in the garage. 

 

I was able to pick up a pink dress for Princess Peach along with a red and green shirt for the girls at Goodwill, some plain caps at Michaels and a yellow t-shirt at Walmart. Then I pulled out an old dragon costume that Dude wore as a baby and transformed it into Yoshi by covering the wings with a shell and cutting off claws and fangs. I did, however, have to sew the jumpers for our cross-dressing oldest girls but they made their mustaches and decorated their hats), sew yellow jammie pants for Dude and create an entire spiked shell and horned hood for Bowser. I did my best to keep it simple! When looking for Bowser ideas on Pinterest, one amazing lady admitted to having spent like 42 hours on her son's costume! I can guarantee you, I did not. I was worried that my stickler for details would be disappointed, but he LOVED it!

In fact, they were all pretty thrilled with the results. Sure, the Princess's crown didn't stay on and turns out that cardboard karts REALLY slow down your trick-or-treating but they were pretty darn cute, even if somebody did mistake L for Godzilla. Ha! And I'm proud of the older girls's hard work. That's not to say that I won't be begging again next year...