This has been a very Halloweenie-weekend. Karin had a girlfriend over to spend the night on Friday who wasn’t going home until late afternoon on Saturday and to stave off any whining about having nothing to do, after breakfast I got out the meager bag of Halloween decorations (which include toilet-paper ghosts made by the kids when they were around 4 years old) and told them to have at it.
They had a great time decorating the kitchen and little hallway, hanging ghosts from the ceiling lamps and paper pumpkin strings across the bay window in the kitchen. They found the CD of creepy Halloween music & sounds and played it loudly while they worked, and then they found a package which I’ve had for years but never bothered to bring out: a DIY giant spider made of black garbage bag parts that you are supposed to fill with fallen leaves. They seized upon it and made it their afternoon project. However, there aren’t that many trees with fallen leaves round these parts and the ones that are, are tiny little golden birch leaves…which would have meant hours upon hours of work.
Finally, I said, why don’t you make Clifford the big red rock (he sits in our front yard) the body of the spider and just fill the leg bags? By this time, they had corralled a neighborhood friend of Karin’s to help and the 3 of them set to with renewed energy. So Clifford got his own Halloween costume and now he’s our own personal Shelob! He only has 4 legs, so he’s kind of a lame spider, but the kids did give him 8 duct-tape eyes, and I think he looks pretty rad! The little girls across the street agreed that he was pretty scary!
That same evening was the AWC Halloween Costume Party for kids and Martin & Karin had been up and down all week about whether or not they wanted to go. It was held at a huge new playplace in Malmö, and I thought they really were too old for it, but I was planning to at least make an appearance there to hand out the newly printed directories, and they decided right before the deadline that they wanted to go. So they put their costumes together in the 2 hours we had between taking Sara home and heading to Malmö and for such a short time to get ready I think they did a damn fine job: Martin & Karin as Night & Day. (Martin wanted to keep the scary laser eyes in the first picture 🙂
And tonight we carved pumpkins, but it’s almost 11 pm and I have to get up at early o’clock in the yawning, so I will post about that tomorrow 🙂