Halloween Horrors and Fun

For the past 4 years I have made the kids Halloween costumes. (I did cheat one year and got Ava a store bought costume when she was 2 months old). I don't proclaim to be "super mom" and I don't consider myself that crafty, but this was my way of doing something extra special for the kids when I was working full time. Since I am a stay at home mom right now, I decided to tackle making costumes for all three kids this year. I must say that the level of stress this project brought about and lack of sleep ranks right up there with some the convoy operations that I conducted in Iraq. First, I waited way to long to start this project. Finally on the Monday before Halloween, I took the kids to the fabric store. My original idea was to make they 3 little monkey, but the store was out of dark brown fake fur. My sister later suggested that I could have made purple or orange monkeys but I am not that daring. Therefore, I opted to make them three little mice, put some sun glasses on them and they are the three blind mice. By late Monday afternoon, I had a pattern, fabric, and my sewing machine out, but I am sure many of you can relate to how hard it is to get anything done with little kids under foot. "After feeding them broth, without any bread, spanking them soundly, and putting them to bed," I was able to get down to work. Monday night I was up until 2am, and then on Tuesday night around 10pm my sewing machine broke. It wasn't the best machine in the world and I have used it a bunch in the last 5 years, but it wasn't a good time for it to break. On Wednesday, I took all the kids to Walmart to buy a new sewing machine. For those of you who are wondering where Ryan is in all of this, he was working at Fort Hood for the week, 3 hours away. Anyway, I stayed up until 2am again on Wednesday, and 1am on on Thursday in order to have all three costumes ready for Halloween on Friday. Well, I got them all done and they were absolutly adorable, both the kids and the costumes. Ryan came home for the weekend. I took the kids to their school party first, and then we all hung out in our cul de sac handing out to trick-or-treaters.

Here are my three little mice raiding the pantry at their school's Harvest Festival. (Don't worry, I will post some additional pictures of the kids all dressed up.)

Earlier in the week the kids had a Halloween party with our playgroup, since my sewing machine broke mid-week and the mice costumes werent' finished yet, I let the kids dress up in their back up costumes. Lizzy of course had a blast being Spiderman. Ava was just into "juice and cake." Casey is just one laid back dude.