A Frozen Halloween

Like thousands of other little girls (though not so many as last year, I imagine!) our kids wanted to dress as their favorite Scandinavian sisters for Halloween: Anna and Elsa, naturally.

Kate and Claire both got Elsa dress-up dresses and shoes for Christmas last year, so for a while, both were planning to be Elsa for Halloween, which I was planning to roll with, but I'm glad Claire decided she wanted to be Anna instead. So, with Mommy, Daddy, and a new sibling arriving mere weeks before Halloween, we planned our Frozen family ensemble.

 

Daddy was Kristoff, Mommy was Sven, and Jonah was Olaf. Our costumes were pretty simple: Matt with black pants, shirt, toboggan, and fleece vest from his own closet, plus a scarf from mine around his waist. I just wore brown and added $5 reindeer antlers I bought on Amazon. For Jonah, I bought a secondhand white fleece sleeper on ebay and sewed black felt on for buttons, and bought the crocheted Olaf hat on Etsy. Jonah actually won first prize in the costume contest at our neighborhood Halloween party. (It's hard to compete with an 8-day-old newborn, though!)



 

My personal favorite was Claire's costume, though. I made her cape and cap out of fuchsia fleece and it just made the ensemble. I couldn't get enough of her little braids sticking out from under her bonnet!

Halloween night itself was rainy and a bit chilly after dark, but between the neighborhood party, church trunk-or-treat, and braving the rain for at least a few streets on the 31st, our candy bowl is full and our Frozen fever sated for the time being!

A St. Patty's Day Announcement...

I haven't felt like blogging much lately, but had to make this little announcement :0)

Happy St. Pat's! You may recall it's a favorite holiday here in The Parsonage Family, but I've been too sick and tired to prepare much fun for the family today. Store-bought green and white cupcakes. That's it.

Food in general and especially cooking disgust me right now, so there will be no shepherd's pie or corned beef and cabbage, and I think the girls will be grateful for that. As grateful as they should be to their little sibling for Mommy's impulse-based cravings (before the overall food-aversion kicked in):
"Mommy, can we stop for ice cream?"
"Ice cream? Sure! Sounds good!"
"Mommy, can we buy some candy in the checkout lane?"
"Sure! How about Twizzlers?"

The girls are really excited, and we are looking forward to our fifth "forever family" member, arriving mid-October.

Saving Photo Christmas Cards

I love the photo Christmas (and New Year) cards so many people send out this time of year. And while I have no trouble tossing the generic winter- or manger-scene cards in the recycling bin at the end of the season, I like to save the photo cards that so encapsulate the year and changing lives of friends and family. For the past seven years, I've saved those cards as part of my Christmas scrapbooking, showcasing them alongside our own family Christmas card for the year.

I've done it in several ways, so allow me to share a few possibilities!

The first couple times, I simply made a collage-type scrapbook page using the photos from some of the photo cards we received—not all, I don't think, though it's probably most of them, since photo cards weren't quite as common in the mid-oughts as they are now :0)

Another approach is to build a pocket into the scrapbook page. Our card and a headline are front and center, but a pasted-in pocket (an actual envelope, in one case) holds all the other photo cards, accessible through the top of the page protector.

 

A new approach was in order once we started doing two-sided cards on nice cardstock. For the past few years then, I've done a separate page protector (cut down to size and sealed) for our family's card, so that front and back can be viewed easily.  The other cards are in a page protector of their own with tie closure embellishment (string between two brads) to keep it closed.

Last year, I made the pockets for all and for ours out of the same page protector, running it through the sewing machine to seal off our card at the bottom and doing the tie-closure again at the top. The downside of that design is that only one friend/family card is very visible on the front and one on the back, because the pocket is so small. Typically, I like to flare the cards out some, with favorites near the top so I can see several even without opening the pocket.

This year, I was less crafty about it and just purchased a pack of Project Life envelope pages. I added a little embellishment at the top, but otherwise let the nice plastic envelope do its job. It has a nice 4x6 pocket on the front for a journaling card to explain the envelope's contents, but I left it empty to let the cards inside speak for themselves. (And I look forward to using the other two envelopes in the pack for Kate's schoolwork and other big items to save!)

I made a simple cut-down page protector for our own card.

I love looking back at our own family's cards through the years, and last year I crafted a decoration to let me and any guests to our home see the progression of our family through those cards, from our marriage to pregnancy, one child to two, and so on. Burlap, a wide sparkly ribbon, and a bunch of paper clips with scraps of ribbon on each one were all it took.

I hope these ideas prompt you to get creative in saving those photo cards from family and friends, and in the words of our card this year, we are WISHING YOU PEACE, LOVE, AND JOY this season and always.

Fighting the Battle against STUFF this Christmas

I often feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of STUFF in our house. For at least five years (my memory of life before kids is hazy) I have declared myself to be fighting a battle against all the stuff in my house. I confess, I usually call it the "War on Crap." But that sounds a little crass. Either way, by "stuff" or "crap," I'm not meaning to insult the quality of objects filling my house, much of which has been gifted to us—and increasingly, to our kids—by kind, generous, thoughtful people.

"Stuff" is the excess, the clutter, the unneeded and often unused things that fill our homes. Stuff doesn't just take up space, but energy as well as we maintain an increasingly cluttered space.

Judging from the number of articles I see to this effect on Facebook these days, and the response when I share them, I know I'm not alone. A lot of parents of young children feel this way. Kids aren't great at picking up after themselves, parents tire of picking up after them, and generous people are always eager to add to the collection of toys and other things, especially at Christmas. I've seen articles from the angle of how to purge the stuff once you have it, and I try to thin the herd as I can, but it's hard for me to part with things a loved one gave so kindly, and I'd rather find ways to free ourselves from the excess and consumerism in the first place, rather than enabling a "revolving door of stuff."

As one other mom asked me when I shared one such article, "how do you tell these generous people to dial it back a bit, without hurting their feelings?" I don't have a great answer. The time I've spent trying to get every word of this post right shows what a touchy issue it can be.

First rule of thumb, I don't say anything to the people outside our family (except on birthday invitations, when I've started saying "no gifts please"). I do tell my kids' grandmothers over and over how much the kids have already and how hard it is to keep the house neat with so much stuff, etc., but I also know how the giving of gifts is special for the giver as well as the receiver. So while I say, "Don't get them anything; they have enough!!" I know that is not realistic and that I need to make some reasonable suggestions.

Rather, I think suggesting alternatives to stuff-gifts is a good way to introduce new ways of gift-giving that kids love, parents can appreciate, and (in some cases) the giver can enjoy alongside the child. Things that won't wind up scattered all over the floor of their room—and every other room! Or, at the very least, bring a fun twist to things we need anyway.

So here is my list of non-stuff gifts one might consider this Christmas.

Experience Gifts

• passes to go roller skating or ice skating
• tickets to a kid-friendly concert, play, or sporting event
• restaurant date to a fun place like Rainforest Café or even a fast food place with a playground
• movie date with a big tub of popcorn
• gift card for an ice cream shop
• visit to a museum or science center
• registration for a season of soccer or a series of swim lessons
• subscription to ABCmouse.com or a magazine like Highlights
• ingredients for a recipe to make together
• seeds to plant and watch grow

Use-up-ables

• art supplies, bubbles, chalk
• supplies and instructions for a science experiment
• a fun food like the ingredients for s'mores or cookies the child can decorate
• stickers or temporary tattoos
• balloons
• a disposable camera
• a notebook and fun pen

Fun Necessities

• socks or tights with a fun pattern (even underwear if you're a close family member!)
• a light-up or character toothbrush
• lotion, body wash, or bubble bath
• hair accessories
• shoes or clothes
• room décor (a bulletin board, special pillow, or art for their wall)
• a cool box in which to house all their little "treasures"

And for the grown-ups...

• restaurant gift card
• gourmet food items (wine and cheese, a fancy dessert, etc.)
• free babysitting
• tickets to a concert, play, or sporting event
• mani/pedi gift card
• overnight at a hotel
• gift card for something they wouldn't ordinarily get for themselves

What do you get someone who already has too much?

Something they keep in their hearts and memories, not on their shelves.

Claire's Halloween Birthday Party

When we heard that Claire's due date was October 30, we knew we just might have a Halloween birthday on our hands. No problem—my birthday is July 4, and having a holiday birthday has been so much fun over the years! Claire ended up being born late on November 1, but her big day is still always intertwined with the Halloween holiday. Last year, we even trick-or-treated on her birthday because of heavy rain the night before. I knew she'd have Halloween-themed birthday parties at least a few times throughout her growing up.

So this, her third birthday, was her first holiday-themed party, partially because the church had the audacity to schedule its fall festival on her actual birthday, a Saturday, so if the party was going to be before Halloween anyway, might as well go all out! With our family Wizard of Oz costumes Claire was the witch, a classic Halloween figure in its own right, and she was the wickedly precious star of her party.

Theme and Décor
It was a classic, kid-friendly, non-scary Halloween party. Orange and black and a bit of green, witches, ghosts, spiders, and pumpkins. I bought a big pack of orange and black cardstock at Michael's and used it for the invitations (thank you, Pinterest, for the ribbon bat idea!) and for pennant banners to hang on the mantle and doorways.

I reused some of the paper fans from BGC's bug party a few weeks ago, adding some white yarn for a spider web on the wall. Usually there is a collection of crosses hanging on that wall, so there were plenty of nails to wrap the yarn around, and on which to mount little Styrofoam ball and pipe cleaner spiders!

Frightful Food

There's always a point in the day or two before a party when I start to feel I'm going overboard with thematic food and such. I'm proud, at least, that I let a couple food items go at the last minute, telling myself "It's okay just to sit and rest for the 20 minutes before guests arrive!"

My mom made chocolate-covered pretzel rods, which I thought of as "magic wands" when combined with these witch hat cookies made from Hershey kisses and inverted Fudge Stripe cookies.

I bought a pack of Halloween picks months ago (as an add-on to get free shipping on VBS supplies from Oriental Trading, I recall!) and they were really cute on the cheese tray, as were the clementine "pumpkins" with celery "stems."

 

Also from Oriental Trading were the little pumpkin cups that I put out for the kids, beside our "witch's brew" green lemonade and "pick your poison" ice bucket with beer and sodas.

 

I had planned on cake pops being the main sweet, but it would have been awkward to stick three candles in one for blowing out, so I'm glad I found this little mini-cake ready-made at Kroger. It had a candy Frankenstein monster on top, which I replaced with this little witch figurine we already had around the house.

Ghoulish Games

I planned three games/activities for the kids to play during the party. 

First, "Pumpkin Bowling." I made the pins with empty water bottles (a little water in them to weight them) and styrofoam balls glued to the top covered with scraps of a worn-out sheet set. The kids knocked down these ghostly pins with pie pumpkins—the perfect size for little hands.

I positioned the game on the front porch with a wall behind it, but pins and pumpkins still ended up rolling down the driveway and into the storm drain. Alas!

Another activity was "Make-a-Monster." I'd originally planned to have little pumpkins the kids could decorate but the more I thought about that, the messier it sounded, and I didn't want little costumes smeared with paint or even Sharpie. So instead, I used the leftover green plates from BGC's party as faces to be decorated monstrously!

I cut out a variety of shapes, and had googly eyes and glue laid out for the kids to go to town with their creativity.

Third, "Pin the Broom on the Witch." Kate had enough practice with it before the party to learn to feel her way to the witch's hand and get the broom right on there (a trick she promptly taught the other kids), so we had quite a lot of "winners." There was still some spontaneity to it for the smaller kids, though!

 

Costumes

 

Even the grown-ups got in on the dress-up action for the party. My in-laws were Mary Poppins and Bert, my mom was a black cat, and my dad was the Great and Powerful Oz to complement our family Wizard of Oz ensemble. We also had Elsa, a dragon, a cheerleader, tennis pro, and football player. A rocket, shooting star, and the cast of Peter Pan were unable to make it at the last minute :0)





 

 

 

 

I'm sure it won't be the last Halloween birthday party for my little fall baby, but it was a fun first!

Happy birthday, Claire!