Halloween/All Saints 2018

For the past several years, we’ve opted for “trick-or-fruiting.”  On Halloween a handful of friends and family offer our kids fruit instead of candy  That way our kids get to have the experience of dressing up without ending up with a bunch of sugar, which is especially bad for Cee.  The willingness of people to come to the door with a bowl of bananas or a baggie of raspberries has been wonderful!

(It’s happened several times that our kids are still receiving their grapes or apples when another bunch of kids comes up.  And the host graciously waits until our kids have turned around before bringing out the Kit Kats and Skittles.  It’s pretty funny to see the looks of confusion on the other kids’ faces when they see the fruit.)

When we get home from trick-or-fruiting, the kids plot and plan to see how much they can eat before bed.  Like normal kids, only with clementines.

Cee has an infusion scheduled for Halloween again this year.  She doesn’t mind spending four or five hours at the hospital because she gets to play with an ipad (what a treat!), do crafts (childlife is wonderful!), and watch TV.   Cee is a tough stick, so usually it takes several pokes to get her IV started.  She’s such a trooper as she breathes through the whole process like a lady in labor.

Before the infusion starts, Cee is given a cocktail of Benadryl, Tylenol, and a steroid in order to keep her from having an allergic reaction.  (Even though we’ve been on this train for a couple years now, it’s still a possibility.  “Allergic reaction resulting in death” is a possible side effect.  Nice.)

All that is to say that infusions make Cee very tired.  Usually she sleeps in the car on the way home and then spends the remainder of the day resting.

So when we were asked what our plan is for Halloween this year, I wasn’t sure how to respond.  We’ll have to see how Cee is feeling.  Maybe she’ll just want to stay home.  Maybe we’ll stop by a few places and need to cut it short because she’s too tired.   I don’t know.  We’ll probably only go to our old hometown.  If you’d like to be added to our route, just let me know.

 

 

 

It occurred to me that I could take pictures of the kids’ costumes BEFORE the actual craziness of Halloween trick-or-fruiting, All Saint’s Day Mass, All Saint’s Day parties, and All Soul’s Day.  Whew.  I’m tired just typing that all out.

As far as costumes, I’d classify our efforts as “costume bin chic.”  Basically the kids can do whatever they want with the understanding that we have to be able to find/upcycle/create their costumes from stuff already in our house.

Here’s the lineup for this year:

 

Cee chose to be Mother Teresa, aka St. Teresa of Calcutta.  She chose her because “she likes babies, and so do I.”  In fact, 10 seconds after this photo was taken, Elle chucked a naked baby doll at Cee to be used as an “accessory.”  Cee wasn’t interested and in a very non-Mother Teresa way let the baby hit her and roll to the floor.  It was funny and terrible at the same time.

Why yes, that is blue masking tape along the edge of an old sheet and a lady’s slip.  The Missionaries of Charity wear a habit with 3 stripes (one thick, two thin), but it’s hard to find good help these days.  And the head taper (me) decided to stop at one stripe.  As I presented Cee with her veil for the first time, she said “Huh, that actually looks like it’s a skirt.”  “Yeah…isn’t that funny?” I said with a forced chuckle.  Cuz it is.  When she finally had her extensively taped costume all together, Cee declared, “The tape is actually really itchy.”  Good to know.

 

Elle opted for a St. Lucia costume this year.  She said “the reason is obvious.”  (Check out the updated “Family” page above if you don’t get it. Wink, wink.)  We already had a dress up dress that was pale, pale pink.  She said that would be fine, even though it wasn’t white.  Then I cut a sash out of some red felt.  Elle constructed her own head wreath out of poster board.

This is actually her second generation head wreath.  The first one took more time– she made leaves instead of a simple green band– but it got broken when the kids were playing with their costumes.  Elle decided that the green band was “good enough” since it was faster to cut out.

The story of St. Lucia involves carrying bread to Christians hiding underground, hence the need for the head candles.  We’re still deciding if she’ll carry some bread (I suggested play food bread, she’s pulling for a real, artisanal (my word, not hers) looking kind of loaf.).  She’s concerned that a prop may interfere with her holiday loot gathering.  We’ll see.

I taped a bunch of paper plates together for Moe’s St. Michael the Archangel wings.  They look like wings made out of paper plates, but they will work.  Moe couldn’t find his sword when I suggested we have a costume dress rehearsal and photo shoot.  (Maybe someone should have told him to leave his sword with his costume last week so it wouldn’t get lost.  Maybe someone *did* tell him, but he was confident that it wouldn’t get lost and decided to play with it anyway.  Maybe *someone* is a little smug that she was right.)

Bea wanted to be St. Beatrice.  Although we knew that there was a St. Beatrice (several, actually), we didn’t know her story.  We looked it up to figure out a costume.  St. Beatrice’s two brothers were killed for being Christians, and their bodies were thrown into the river.  St. Beatrice secretly had the bodies taken out to be buried.  She was caught and hung for being a Christian.  She is depicted with a rope.

Okay.  So.  To make that three-year-old appropriate, Bea chose her favorite church dress and Elle made her a halo out of a paper plate.  We thought about having her carry around a rope as an accessory, but that seemed unnecessarily gory.

Mateo will actually go out and about as a lion, but he was sleeping during dress rehearsal.  (That’s probably the whole reason we were able to have a dress rehearsal.)  I thought it might be fun to have a picture of him as well, though, since he’s growing so much.  In looking through our photos, it looks like he’s mostly naked in many of the pictures.  He’s always been a big drooler, so it was easier to avoid clothing altogether.  Plus we’ve had to do a lot of collecting urine samples from him.  And he doesn’t like having things pulled over his head.  Nudity was the answer to several problems.  Except, not any more now that it’s getting chilly.

At any rate, we’ll call Mateo pre- brown robe and tonsure St Francis.  This is St. Francis when he leaves all his worldly riches behind (including all his clothes!) quite dramatically in order to follow God’s call.  Naked St. Francis.

The kids will wear these to our homeschool co-op’s All Saint’s Day party on Friday.  Since I don’t feel like re-creating them after trick-or-fruiting, the kids will probably wear something random for that.  Cee’s going to wear a yellow dress and be Belle, Elle might wear another dress up dress and be Laura Ingalls Wilder. Moe will be a firefighter, and Bea wants to be a puppy.  (The puppy costume is technically size 24 months.  I had a hard time peeling it off of her after dress rehearsal because it was quite snug.  I had to keep from getting panicky.  It was like the canister all over again!)

To recap, we hope to go trick-or-fruiting this year.  Let me know if you’d like us to stop by.  But if we don’t, it just means Cee was too tired from her infusion and we had to go home early.  Thank you to all who help make this holiday one of the kids’ favorites!