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So who’s ready for Halloween?!

What?

What’s that you say?

I’m supposed to be posting about Christmas this week?

Yes. Well.

I meant to get this up as a quick day after Halloween post, but it turns out I was so tired from actually living through Halloween that I didn’t get much of anything done the day after. So you get this post today.

This was the first time Abe really grasped the whole trick-or-treating thing, and he was pretty into it once he got going. Earlier in the day he kept telling me, “I want you to say ‘trick-or-treat’ for me, because I’m going to be feeling shy.” But then he wasn’t! He even said “thank you” and “happy halloween” regularly and stood around asking for M&Ms at houses that were giving out non-M&M candy.

Up until a few weeks before Halloween, Abe wanted to be Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc., even though he’s never managed to sit through more than 10 minutes of the movie. Because he’s green, and Abe loves green. I wasn’t that excited about the Mike Wazowski plan, so I was quite pleased when he switched over to wanting to be a mail carrier. We just bought a costume on Amazon, since I already had two other costumes to DIY and wasn’t feeling up for another. This is not a high quality costume; the tag warned me not to wash, dry, or dry clean it. Spot clean only! But it was adorable on him, and he loved it, so that was good enough for me. He got those star boots from my mom for his birthday last year, and I highly recommend them to go with a mail carrier costume. Or just all the time, because they’re adorable:

Milo and Gus both opted for Zelda characters this year. They told me what they needed and showed me pictures, and I assembled pieces as well as I could. Gus was Ganondorf:

He already had the black pants, and he made the thing that’s hanging around his neck from cardboard. I found the cape and the red sweater at the thrift store, and he drew the design on a piece of a white felt there. He was supposed to have red hair, but, after we dyed it, he declared that it felt funny and went to wash it out. He still has sort of pinkish hair after two washings, and I hope it goes away soon, because we’re getting photos done this weekend.

Milo was Link (Toon Link, I am reminded repeatedly. There’s a difference, apparently):

I liked this one a lot, because it was cute, and Milo looks really good in green. We bought the hat on Etsy (the shop I bought from doesn’t have it in stock right, but there are tons of them on there. It would also, of course, be a super simple sewing project for someone who can do super simple sewing). I bought the light green shirt from the women’s section of the thrift store, along with that brown belt (and we added that symbol that Milo drew on a piece of construction paper attached to cardboard). We bought the leggings from Amazon (here’s the link, but as I’m writing this they only have fuschia in stock. I’ll put it here in case this is a temporary leggings shortage).

I was sure I’d be able to find something at the thrift store that would work for the green tunic, but I didn’t even find anything close. We ended up buying two yards of green felt at Michaels, cutting a hole for his neck, and closing up the open sides as well as we could with the belt. And I struck out with finding boots, too. The problem is that his feet are so big (he wears a mens 10 1/2 or 11 already) that womens and kids sizes wouldn’t fit, so we just didn’t have much to choose from. And then he really, really wanted the ocarina, and who am I to thwart his musical ambitions? Kid wants an ocarina instead of a sword, I say yes.

But Ari’s costume was the most….original by far:

He’s Thanksgiving dinner!

He wanted to just wear the turkey leg hat and call it done, but I told him that 5′ 10″ fourteen year old trick-or-treaters have to put in more effort than that (though they can buy some good will by adorably accompanying their toddler brothers around). So we came up with the idea of taping photos of other assorted Thanksgiving dishes to his jacket. It was a hit. The hat came from Target a few years ago; I looked the other day, and they don’t appear to be selling them this year, but I found this one on Amazon.

And, to round out Fall Fun week here at Boxy Colonial (I actually might have one more fall fun related post on Friday….we’ll see how things go. But I definitely have house stuff for next week. Maybe TWO house things!)….here’s this year’s pumpkin: it’s a terrifying bear. Of course. (Here’s the pattern we used):