Halloween Morning

It was a rough morning trying to get everyone ready and out the door with all of my stubborn kids! Jani was fine -- she was out the door before I got up. Jase said he wasn't going to dress up this year. I said that if he was too old to dress up then he was too old to go trick-or-treating and he could stay home and pass out candy. So he conceded by saying he would be a Hobo. So this morning he put on some old cut up jeans and a T-shirt. I never thought I would say this but I said, "Okay, now go get your shirt dirty!" Believe me, no problem there! He always comes home from school with a dirty shirt! Then I put some brown eye-shadow on him to look like a mustache and beard. He freaked over that one... "What? Make-up?? I am NOT wearing make-up!!" He then went and washed it all off. I explained that you use make-up for most Halloween things -- beards, scars, blood..." I even showed him some pictures from the Internet. He finally went and smeared some eye-shadow back on his face. Then I asked why he was wearing his blue and gold cub scout socks and he said, "Because I don't have any clean socks." Like that has ever stopped him before. A hobo doesn't have clean socks anyway, but not wanting him to smell as bad as he looked I told him to go look through the six loads of clean laundry that was dumped all over my bedroom floor and never put away.

Then there was Jared. He had found a Santa hat a couple of weeks ago which he has been wearing all of the time. He said he wanted to be Santa for Halloween. Well, of course we don't have a Santa Costume. We do have a red devil costume though and so he wore that and took the attached cape and turned it around to the front instead of the back, tying it behind his neck in order to cover up the big black pitch fork on the front of the costumes. I found a perfect big black belt but he refused to wear it saying it was a girls' belt (it was). So he wore his brown church belt instead. Then he was crying because he didn't know how he would get out of the costume in order to go to the bathroom during school. He wore his black church shoes and white socks. I tried to get him to wear black socks to at least give the allusion of black boots but he stuck with white gym socks. He looked more like an elf than Santa. He makes a cute elf though.

Janelle wanted to be a rock star. I told her I could do her hair really wild but she said, "No -- I want it straight down with a head-band." I gave her some black sun-glasses, but she insisted on the purple ones. Jaiden wanted to be a fairy. At least I was able to get a few curls in her hair since she was too engrossed in "Clifford" on TV to care what I was doing. Josh was the dog from "Blues Clues," and Jenna was a little bear. After Jaiden went to pre-school, I took the two youngest to the school parade of costumes. It was so crowded that we had to park several blocks away. I brought my video-camera, but not wanting to waste the battery, I kept it off until I could spot my kids. But then it took so long to actually turn on that by that time the only thing I could get was the back of their heads. Oh well!