Spooktacular Month of October

Halloween often gets left behind at our house.  Everything usually waits until the last minute, and then it's over in a blink of an eye.  Most of the time I don't mind Halloween zipping by, but this year I decided I wanted to get into the Halloween spirit more and do more activities with the kids.  I wanted to create some fun memories, and create some possible traditions for the future.  This is what we did for Family Home Evening in October:

October 1st-- Witch Hunt
Gardner Village is such a great {free} place to go in October.  The decorations are suburb, and they are quite famous for their large witch collection.  We found a witch riding a bike over a pond, one rafting down the river with TNT, one with a cat and mouse chasing under her skirt, one that had crashed into a barn, one playing the piano, and one pretending to be a fireman. We loved seeing the fall decorations up at Gardner Village and seeing the cute shops.  Lizzy was fascinated with the pumpkins everywhere, including some that fell into the creek.

October 8th-  Candy Apples and Paper Ghosts
We attempted to make candy apples for Family Home Evening during the second week in October.  I wanted to make the caramel from scratch, so I bought all the ingredients and spent a great deal of time making it, but the caramel overcooked and it came out very hard to chew.  It was still yummy, just a little hard on the teeth.  We made paper ghosts while the caramel was cooking.  The kids and Brad had fun creating character ghosts out of tissue, cotton balls, and string.  Scott made a creeper ghost, Emma made a Nyan Cat ghost, and Brad and Emma made Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter battling each other with wands (toothpicks).

Monday, October 15th-  "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" and Homemade Pumpkin Bread
I did not expect the pumpkin bread to be such a hit, but we ate that bread in almost one serving while watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  It helped that I made honey butter spread to go with it.  We decided to watch the first part of Harry Potter, since Emma was almost done reading the book series with Papa at the time.

Monday, October 22nd-  "Nightmare Before Christmas" and Dirt with Worms
We introduced Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas" to Lizzy, and she became obsessed with it.  She watched it over and over for the next few days and had a number of lines memorized.  I just about died of laughter when I gave her a bowl of soup and she told me, "What's this?  Frog's breath?"  We made some dirt with jello worms while the movie was playing, and it was a big hit.  Very, very yummy.

Monday, October 29th- Spooky Dinner, Spiders for Dessert, and Carving Pumpkins
I decided to make a spooky dinner on the Monday before Halloween.  I made eyeball meatballs, using ground turkey and olives.  I also made some spaghetti and died it green to make it look more spooky.  It was a very spooktacular dinner.  The spider cookies were yummy, too, and the pumpkins turned out wonderful.  I made a Jack Skellington face, Emma made a cat, and Scott made a Gravity Falls jack-o-lantern.

Halloween Night
For our Halloween costumes this year, Emma decided to be Catwoman, Scott was a reaper from a video game, Lizzy was Red Riding Hood, David was a Little Bad Wolf, and Brad was a woodcutter.  I was boring this year and decided not to dress up.

We had a wonderful time dressing up and going over to Brad's work in the late afternoon on Halloween.  After that, we went over to Bruce and Loralee's house for dinner and trick-or-treating.  Loralee made a delicious Halloween-themed dinner with her famous snake sandwiches, witches brew, deviled eggs, and salad.  It was fun going trick-or-treating in our neighborhood and seeing our neighbors.  I love living here.