Later in the week I’ll have a (gasp!)…..Christmas post for you, but first here’s a quick goodbye to Halloween post. I hope none of you wanted to dress up as the Apollo 11 stones this year, because this post is coming too late to do you any good. File it away for next year. But let me back up.

We decided to skip a pumpkin patch visit this year, even though it seemed terribly wrong. Free weekends have been in very short supply lately, and, well, we already had a bunch of pumpkins from the grocery store. Our pumpkin carving this year was not as elaborate as the past few years, but it did fit in with our decomposing composers theme. Gus did the one on the left all by himself:

But we did make it to Halloween Hikes at the Chattahoochee Nature Center, another Halloween tradition for us. I don’t have any photos of the actual hike, because it was dark, but the idea is that you walk along a path through the woods and encounter assorted costumed animals and other things from nature (a tree! sometimes a water droplet!) who tell you a little about themselves. The older kids had been starting to age out of it just about the time Abe came along, so we’re very excited to have an excuse to go for a few more years.

Milo and Gus refused to smile for the picture, but then 3 seconds later Gus looked like this:

Notice all the shorts and t-shirts. It’s still SO HOT here. 86 on Halloween. I’m sick of it. Grr.

They also have a big bonfire and a drummer, and instruments for the kids to try out:

And the gym is set up with all kinds of stations to make crafts:

So, as you can see, Abe was a firefighter for Halloween. I got him to pick something nice and early, so I grabbed the costume on ebay and then the hat at Kroger, of all places (after I looked in vain for a higher quality black or yellow one on Amazon; all I could find was the super cheap, thin plastic ones that won’t stay on toddler heads and would probably break before Halloween). And then I mentioned to my mom that we needed boots, and somehow between my mom and me we wound up with FIVE pairs of black boots from thrift stores (and a pair I remembered too late we already had). So he had a lot to choose from. I found one pair that actually said Fire Chief on them, but they were just too big to try to make him trick or treat in. Maybe he’ll be a firefighter again next year.

The older kids’ costumes were a little….quirkier (and also more last minute. They drove me crazy this year putting off deciding what to be. Ari was working on his costume ON Halloween):

I identified Milo and Gus’s costumes only as “obscure video game characters” when I posted this photo on facebook and instagram, but, to be more specific, Milo was Mr. Crow from Cube Escape and Gus was Richard Conway from Gunpoint. Yeah, I don’t know; I just look up pictures on image search and buy what they tell me to buy. Fortunately, a crow mask is actually a thing one can buy on Amazon.

Ari is taking AP Art History this year and decided to go as prehistoric art, specifically the Apollo 11 stones.

He made it himself….black t-shirt, styrofoam painted with faux stone spray paint, and then acrylic paint over it. Then we hot glued the styrofoam onto the shirt. I think it turned out looking surprisingly authentic. It was hard for him to sit down in it, though.

Hope everyone else had a lovely Halloween….and if you have some fall weather wherever you are, please send it our way!