This is the first year I haven’t managed a Halloween decorating post of any sort, which is kind of a bummer, but….things are busy and all that. Next year! Maybe! I hope! Because Halloween decorating is fun.

We did do a little bit of decorating, just nothing exciting enough to blog about (I mean. I guess I’m kind of blogging about it now. But nothing exciting enough to merit a “hey! You, too, can do this Halloween decorating thing!” kind of post)

Our jack o’lanterns this year were Braves/Ronald Acuña, Jr. themed. Which makes me think that we should have done a whole zombie baseball theme inside and outside, but since I’m just thinking of it now, the day after Halloween, it did not happen. Patterns here.

Abe kind of fit into the theme in that he dressed up at a BAT. Get it? Because bats are animals but ALSO things you hit baseballs with! Fun! In fact, I jokingly suggested he wear a baseball hat instead of his bat hood so he could be a baseball bat for Halloween, and he got really into the idea. “I should do that! It’s a pun!” He loves puns. That’s my boy!

But I really didn’t want him to actually do it, because his bat hood was SO FREAKIN’ ADORABLE. Fortunately, he forgot about it by trick-or-treating time.

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We actually bought some of the bat components last winter at Ikea on Superkea Sunday (hey, it’s the same post where I talk about my New Year’s goal of blogging here at least once a week. hahahahahahaha!) But we accidentally bought two sets of furry leg things and no wings. And then we accidentally forgot to find a weekend when we had to time to go back to Ikea and exchange them, and now, as far as I can tell from looking online, they don’t sell them at all anymore. So I ended up ordering wings on Amazon. They were kind of pricey, but really nice quality, and, since Abe tends to wear the heck out of his costumes year round, I didn’t mind. Because SO CUTE. I finished things off with black leggings and a black t-shirt from Target. And then after I bought the black t-shirt I found two more nearly identical long sleeved black t-shirts in my closet in his size (hand me downs from Gus). Apparently he’s going to have a very emo winter, wearing all these black t-shirts:

That was a lot of pictures of Abe in his (adorable) bat costume.

We didn’t buy the bat costume with Halloween intentions, by the way, but he was all for it when I suggested in August that we use it for that. I’m surprised he didn’t insist on being Ronald Acuña, Jr. (see: pumpkins. Abe is very into baseball).

The older kids dressed up, too! Well, sort of. They put off costume decision making forever, but went with pretty simple costumes in the end. Ari wasn’t going to dress up at all, but I saw this lion mask at Target and asked if he wanted it, just in case he needed a costume. And then when we got to our Halloween party last night, his friends harassed him into going back to the car to get his mask. That’s the kind of peer pressure I can support.

I got Gus the zebra mask at the same time, so that he could be hunted down and killed by his big brother the lion. Or maybe just so I could buy him this funny t-shirt to go with it:

And Milo was, as usual, an obscure character from an obscure video game. He’s “the reader” from Pyre. I don’t know what this means, but here’s his costume:

My job was to buy a gray cloak on Amazon and some gauze from the grocery store, and he did the rest. Like making that star thing out of electrical tape. Dave and I thought the star made it look like he had joined some sort of scary cult, but don’t worry: not a cult, just an obscure video game.

And here are the four of them together:

Halloween was lots of fun, with a homeschool group party for Abe in the morning, then the annual Halloween parade around our neighborhood, then over to our friends’ Halloween party/haunted house for trick-or-treating and whatnot. Ari’s last Halloween at home! Excuse me while I go cry into his lion mask.