Halloween

We had a great Halloween weekend!  On Friday the kids wore their costumes to school, and I watched Eliza and Luke's Halloween parade in chilly weather (but thankful it wasn't as cold as past years).  Both kids were walking so fast I hardly had time to snap pictures of them.  Can you guess what their costumes are?

I helped with Eliza's class party, bringing a TP-mummy-wrapping game and a candy-corn-chopsticks game.  (Eliza requested the TP game and I was hesitant to waste toilet paper after The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, but when I went to Walmart and saw that they actually had 4-packs of toilet paper for $.60, I relented.)  After school, Luke and his friend showed me the little ghost lights they'd made in their class.  Luke named his ghost Tom.  That night Luke helped me make a Jack-O-Lantern pizza for dinner, and Eliza went to the Lindon Halloween Bash with two friends.

On Saturday we did the Fall activities Luke had been requesting: raking leaves and jumping in the pile and carving pumpkins.  He was SO HAPPY, and the rest of us had a good time too.  It's nice to have a younger kiddo around to help us get hyped and have fun.

In the evening we went to our ward's chili cookoff and trunk-or-treat.  Earlier in the week, during the same shopping trip when I'd bought the cheapest toilet paper imaginable, I realized I had no plan for decorating the van for the trunk-or-treat.  I did a quick Google search for ideas and decided that we had nearly enough props to be able to pull off a Hogwarts trunk, and would only need to buy a few things to complete the look.  I excitedly told the kids later that day and they were a bit puzzled.  "But Mom, none of us are dressed as Harry Potter characters."  True.  I filed this in the back of my mind and approximately 30 minutes before the activity started that night, inspiration struck, and I decided that I would be Moaning Myrtle and Ben would be Harry Potter.  Ben was a good sport and it all came together pretty well.

Luke: MIB Agent
(he drew the blood on himself)

Eliza: Zombie Vsco Girl
(for the other dress-up occasions, she was a regular live Vsco Girl)

Jack: Raptor Owen
(from Jurassic World - part Blue and part Owen)

Our city didn't have an official day designated for trick-or-treating, but our friends and neighbors were all planning to go out Saturday night.  So, Eliza and her friend left the Church with Luke, trick-or-treating their way back to our house.  Jack wasn't happy with us for telling him he was too old to go trick-or-treating, but got excited about trying to liven up the evening by giving kids a little scare when they came to our house.  He kept his raptor mask on and pretended to be asleep in a chair with the front door open, then startled awake, opening the jaw to make the mask roar, when someone came for candy.  We had very few trick-or-treaters and I suspect it had something to do with Jack's unconventional presentation.

(Luke's Jack-o-lantern is on the left,
Jack's Gourd-zilla is in the middle,
and Eliza's Frankenstein's Monster is on the right.)

On Sunday afternoon we ventured out on a Halloween-ish excursion: driving to the nearest gh0ost town.  Thistle, UT isn't a ghost town in the conventional sense: the tiny town in Spanish Fork Canyon was buried by a landslide in 1983.  There's not much left, but we found a few buildings on the side of the highway.  This one in the middle of a pond is a bit surreal:

For dinner that night everyone helped make Dinner in a Pumpkin.  But it was not a success: I liked it, nobody else did.  And after one or two failed attempts at making variations of this festive dinner in the past, I've now decided ... I'm done.

There was exactly one trick-or-treater at our house Sunday night.

Utah.