Well, that was fun, but I am totally wiped out now! We had the big AWC Halloween costume party tonight, and wow, what a difference it makes with activity coordinators who are committed and hard-working and most of all, THERE. The kids and I got there at 4 p.m. to help set up the table decorations, which we brought with us: dried maple leaves in yellow, orange and red, dried rowan berries and papery orange japanese lantern seedpods.
The rest of the decorating and setup committee had been at the restaurant the evening before setting up halloweeny stuff all over the place and really bringing on the atmosphere. The kids folded napkins and put them at each place along with silverware and then distributed the leaves and berries at each candle centerpiece. Suzanne showed up shortly afterwards and began blowing up orange and black balloons and we ran around taping the columns with them. They didn’t last more than 15 minutes after the children started arriving though! This was actually a smaller party than in previous years, there were only 63 guests and of those, only 28 were adults. We had an excellent buffet dinner and then the party continued with all the things which make a Halloween party for children really work: a costume parade with toy/treat bags for each child, trick-or-treating (with American candy!), pin-the-nose-on-the-pumpkin, wrap the mummy games and instead of a potato Katie played Hot Pumpkin with the kids which was a hoot.
And then everyone who was still there at 8:30 pitched in and helped clean up and take down and gather all the decorations together for packing, so we were home by 9 p.m.! The only disappointment was that they no longer have a costume contest, so Martin’s awesome Lego piece couldn’t win any prizes, but I think you’ll all agree it’s a winner! You can’t see my batwings very well in the photo, but I assure you they were there, and I have to say I think my daughter has makes an excellent clone trooper (and bears an eerie resemblence to Luke Skywalker as well). She insisted on spraypainting the back of her hair white so it would look more like a helmet since her mask only covered her face. 🙂
