An Australian Halloween

I LOVE Halloween. I HATE Halloween in Australia. But I was bound and determined to make it as fun as possible for the kids. And as if people don't already think I'm crazy enough-- I decided to push myself right over the edge and have a party.
Most of the kids that came said it was the first Halloween party they had ever been to. I wanted everything to be perfect (it turned out a far cry from perfect, but the kids had a blast). I made up a playlist of a bunch of Halloweeny songs-- which of course included Thriller. I made jello with gummy snakes in it. I had green juice. I put up all the Halloween decorations I had (which sadly aren't that many). And believe it or not, I actually cleaned my house. And now, here I am blogging about it, with my house still in shambles. But hey, I have to have my priorities in order which is why I'm sitting right here right now.
Halloween isn't a very celebrated holiday here. When I first came here I heard people calling it a pagan holiday. Whatever. Losers. They're just jealous because they've missed out on the best holiday ever. One parent that dropped her daughter off here asked me what Halloween was about. I told her I thought it had something to do with celebrating the dead, but to me it was all about dressing up and getting candy.
*By the way, I don't know who this kid is, I just thought it was cute and it helped break up all these boring words.

All week I've been cutting out Thomas' sandwiches in Halloween shapes. Space is limited, so I could only work with a few: a bat, a witch's hat, and a ghost. So on Halloween I made Penny a ghost sandwich too. I wanted to take a picture of her and she was smiling-- which was fine, but I wanted her to look scared. So I told her to have a scared face and she said, "I'm not afraid of ghosts. I can punch them, see?"


Thomas was this skeleton guy. I think he just chose this so he wouldn't have to wear his glasses.

Penny was a fairy. She was so excited she managed to give herself a double chin.

Sam was a pirate-- but right here he reminds me more of Pancho Villa.

I love these pictures. Penny knew darn well how cute she looked, and she was so excited she couldn't contain herself. She had her arms around her brothers and was singing one of her made up songs (she has MANY). She was singing, "Oh ya! You guys are my boyfriends!" In one picture you can even see her doing a little dance. She is such a crack up.



Isn't Penny SO DANG CUTE?!? Now I'm tempted to dye her hair blue permanently. Ha ha. But after a while she started to complain (she's very good at that) that she was all itchy. So she ditched the wig somewhere and later she changed her outfit as well. She still looked cute in her new outfit-- one she's worn to dance. She reminds me of Shirley Temple in her pink dress (you can see her later on, but not very good).

Amber was the first one to show up. A while ago Thomas told me that Amber was his girlfriend. So of course Jason and I have teased him about that. So when they were making their bags, Thomas said, "And mummy, I am NOT in love with Amber!" Okay-- so that described the first picture.
In the second picture-- and this cracked me up-- Amber leaned toward Thomas and said in her cute little accent, "Now Thomas, tell the truth." And then Thomas confessed, "Okay, we're boyfriend and girlfriend." TOO FUNNY!!!
(Thomas must have a thing for brunettes. In Texas, his first girlfriend, Katy, had brown hair too.)


This is Mayra. She does daycare at her house just up the street and that's where Penny and Sam go. She is wonderful. She's from Guatemala but has been here for quite a while. This is her daughter Isabella-- or Bella as we always call her. Penny calls Bella her sister-- so sweet! Mayra grew up celebrating Halloween too, so I think she was happy to finally go to a Halloween party.

I knew that none of the kids would have trick or treat bags-- so I had them make their own. I had a ton of construction paper and lots of paper bags, so they were kept busy.

My biggest disappointment at the party: the cupcakes. As usual I was running behind and didn't get to decorate the cupcakes before the kids arrived. No problem, I'd just do them while they were decorating their bags. I was going to use green frosting and make the cupcakes look like Frankenstein. So I pull out my tub of frosting-- brought all the way from America along with the rest of my year supply. I open it up to add the food coloring and it just didn't look right. It had a ton of oil on the top. No biggie-- I'll just mix it up really good. Then I started having visions of a room full of puking kids, poisoned by my cupcakes. I tasted it and I'll admit that it tasted a bit 'off', but still thought it might be fine. So I start looking around for an expiration date: September 2007. Yes, I brought already expired food across the world just to throw it away. Mayra came over and I told her I was having a dilemma. She said, "Oh it should be fine if it's within 3 months." I explained it wasn't. So she said, "Probably even 6 months would be fine." I proceeded to tell her it was 2 years. Surprisingly, she didn't freak out at this weird American. She even tasted it! She agreed with me though-- it was a bit off. Luckily my mother-in-law had some chocolate frosting at home. So the poor kids missed out on my Frankenstein cupcakes. There's always next year!

Yes I know this picture is lousy, but it was the only one I managed to take of the kids bobbing for apples. After they got one they brought it over to me where I dipped in it caramel and set it aside to cool. Actually, it would have been fine to eat right then-- but as if I wanted something that sticky being eaten by kids running all through the house.

In a house full of sugar crazy kids, somehow I wasn't paying attention to Penny. She had been putting sprinkles on her cupcake, which was fine by me. But then I realized she was shaking the sprinkles directly into her mouth. There you go, cut out the cupcake middle man and put the sugar right where it belongs.

When I was trying to find Halloween games online-- the one that was on every site was this mummy wrapping game. I had bought 18 rolls of toilet paper, thinking that I'd let every kid get wrapped. Holy cow the kids just went berserk. There was toilet paper EVERYWHERE. In the first round I had Thomas and his 'girlfriend' Amber racing against each other. I don't know if anyone ever even kept track of who won-- they just kept going and going and going...





You'd think these two were twins, but they're not. This is Nan and Grandad's neighbor's. Emilie on the left is in kindergarten with Malcolm, and Aimee on the right isn't in school yet. I wasn't sure if all the kids would have costumes, so I left my costume box out for them to look through. So they looked more like twins before the pink high heels and mermaid skirt. They're such cute girls. Every once in a while I'll find a cute note they drew and put in the mailbox for me. Cuties.

We only walked down the road to Cameron and Samuel's to trick or treat. I know the second picture is pretty poor quality, but I wanted to include it to show why it's hard to trick or treat here: a LOT of walking. It wouldn't be so bad in a city, but out here in the sticks most everyone has acreage-- so even though the twins' house is a about 4 houses away-- it took a bit to get there because of all the 'extra' land in between.



This is what I found when I came back home. Thomas, Cameron and Samuel had pulled down all the spiderweb and and wrapped themselves up in it.
In the first picture you can see Sam tormenting Penny in the background. I swear that those two were born to break me. They've triumphed.
The second picture down you can see Pirate Sam took it upon himself to come and get the boys with a sword that another pirate left behind.




This one is Cameron. He was showing me his eye candy and I thought the picture turned out really cool.

This dog came waddling over to the kids. It's the fattest dog I've ever seen! And on top of it's obesity, they said it's almost completely blind. Poor thing.

Me and my pirate. I stole this shirt from Thomas. I had planned on wearing a black wig-- but when i pulled it out at the last minute it was all squashed. So this little witches hat was the next best thing.