Happy Halloween!

 This is my mom.  She came over earlier this week to teach me Sewing 101 and help me make make a cloak for Monkeyman's Jedi costume.  

  While we were working, Monkeyman was pretty wound up ('Cause Grandma was here!) and I came up with a great way to keep him occupied.  When he picked up a pair of tweezers and asked me how they worked, I showed him how to hold them and had him pick up a crumb off the table... then I had a "lightbulb over my head" moment and quickly grabbed a handful of rice and a bowl, and told him to practice picking up the grains of rice and putting them into the bowl.  He was focused so intently on this that it kept him busy until we were finished!  I am definitely going to try letting him do this sometime when I am reading to him and see if it helps his attention span last longer.

 Ta-da!  Monkeyman is modeling his finished cape with the rest of his costume.

 And here are my boys about to go trick-or-treating!  It had rained all day but the sun came out right before T-or-T started, so we got to go after all.  Little Bug did a couple houses and was over it pretty quickly, but Monkeyman had a blast.

 

Adorable I am, yes?

One of my favorite things about Halloween is checking out all of the other creative costumes out there when we are Trick-or-Treating.  This year's best were:  the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man from Ghostbusters, a girl who was a basket of laundry, a group of kids who were three gorillas and a banana, and this little girl who was wearing the most beautiful handmade owl costume.  It was amazing.  

I do have one thing to vent about though.  May I just say that if my boys happened to be girls instead, they would absolutely NOT be allowed to wear slutty costumes, which seems to be the trend for the past few years now.  What is up with that?  I mean, self-expression is one thing, but why send the message that exposing maximum amounts of skin (in freezing October, no less!) is cool?  Girls - there's SO much more to you than that!  This is something I would most certainly put my foot down about - and it's not like I'm some kind of religious fundamentalist like the parents in Footloose - I'm not religious at all!  Yet an Uber-Catholic friend of mine posted a picture of his very young (6th or 7th grade?) daughter in a slutty skeleton costume.  Really?!?  I just find it completely baffling.  If you can think of it, there is a slutty version of it out there.  Last night we saw a slutty Freddy Krueger.  On an adult I would actually find that funny... but on a middle schooler?  Yeah, all that socialization is doing such great things for them.

Ok, rant's over.  Happy Halloween everyone!  I hope a fun and safe holiday is had by all!  :)