halloween 2011

for halloween this year, my sisters and i decided to have our girls be candy corns. i mass produced four little dresses for all of them and even finished a few days before halloween. they are very simple dresses. no pattern, just flying by the seat of my pants. that may be why my girls' dresses will fit them until they're eight years old ("who wants to be a candy corn again this year?").

diane's favorite part of the costume is the silky ribbon by her face that she gets to snuggle with. when i tried it on her for fitting purposes, she wouldn't let me take it off. thus, the thumb in the mouth for all of the pictures.

unfortunately, i didn't finish them early enough to get a picture with all four of the girls together in them, but here are my nieces in theirs, pictures courtesy of my siblings:

elizabeth

rachel

despite my halloween grinchedness, i have bought pumpkins for my children every year. i think we've carved them once before, but this year madeleine was really excited about her pumpkin. when we first got them, she insisted that we paint it. i'm not sure where she got this idea because we never talked about painting pumpkins and i don't remember seeing a painted pumpkin with her. it probably stems from her general obsession with painting right now.

i actually wasn't there for the painting portion. randy says it was fairly chaotic. you see, diane also loves painting right now, but hers is more of a love of putting paint brushes in her mouth. so randy was trying to help madeleine, while simultaneously keeping diane from eating an entire tube of paint. is it bad to say that i'm glad i wasn't there?

anyway, after painting the pumpkin, madeleine decided that she also wanted to carve the pumpkin. so, she designed the face all by herself and randy helped her execute it. 

as i predicted, madeleine did not enjoy pulling the seeds out of the pumpkin. she is our neat and tidy child and the gooey innards of a pumpkin did not appeal to her. so randy pretty much ended up doing everything with the pumpkin.

diane got bored with the process pretty early on and decided to set up a bed on the floor of the kitchen and fake sleep.

throughout the carving process, madeleine kept asking why we were doing what we were doing (never mind that she was the one that had begged to carve it). we tried to explain, but she was not satisfied. it was not until we put the candle in at the end and turned the lights off that she got it. she loved it.

homemade costumes and two pumpkin activities. not bad for a grinch's halloween.