When I was a kid, my Mum wouldn’t let us go out Trick or Treating (or guisin’ as it’s known around these parts). Her view was that it was akin to begging so never mind the death by being a social misfit element. Cheers Mum!

Anyway, perhaps as a result or perhaps because I am a grown woman trapped in an 8 year old’s body I make a BIG FUSS about Hallowe’en now and luckily our neighbours do too. I had a trug in the hall for apple dookin’, little bags made up for all our visitors and extra sweets & monkey nuts for tricks. This was the front of our house last night:

Hey – I never said I was an artist!

Bob carved a couple of pumpkins, doing his now customary Jack Skellington-O-Lantern and a different creepy lantern for added spooky factor.

And I carved my first ever pumpkin which I am SO IMPRESSED with!

Alas in all the hurry to get out on time I got NO PHOTOS OF THE CHILDREN! Hopefully my sister will have some, otherwise I might have to get them all dressed up again which I’m sure they’ll hate

The kids had a great night, we were out for maybe an hour and they have enough sweets, crisps, apples & tangerines to keep them happy until Christmas! Luckily the weather held out for them and it was a nice mild night. I hope you enjoyed your Hallowe’en as much as we did, and blessed Samhain to the Wiccans, Pagans and Gaels.

Posted under with the kids

Okay! For my first post in the NaBloPoMo challenge, I’m bringing to you my eldest’s costume for hallowe’en. May I present to you, Sid Precious:

I have to admit, it’s not the best get up but it was good enough for him to win best costume at his school hallowe’en party. What you can’t see is the large spider’s web “tattoo” on his neck and the “antifa” tattoo on his earlobe. He also had “love” and “cake” on his fingers. Hilariously, the hubby’s Mum asked him how he’d got his teeth to be so realistically missing (both have fallen out very recently) and her face was a picture when hubby said, “Oh, we kicked them out.” (We really didn’t, social services).

Still… That’s two out of three years that he’s won best costume, and last year he was robbed by a cheater who wore a shop bought costume. Not that I’m bitter! Feel free to check through the archives for last year’s costume because it really was outstanding.

More tomorrow!

Posted under for the kids, with the kids

The amount of art & craft stuff we have is tremendous, and my younger son is finally getting to a stage where he wants to draw and paint so it’s been great having his handiwork on display around the house. I noticed recently how many scrap ends, broken lumps and half chewed crayons we had lying around so over the last week while Bob and I gutted the kids rooms I saved all the bits of crayon.

I finally had half an hour free the other night, so out came all the collection and I added into it a few packs of the free crayons you get from restaurants. We ended up with a fairly large selection! We cut them up into smaller chunks for ease.

Pile them up into a mini muffin tin. Bear in mind they’re going to melt.

Pop the tray in the oven – I put ours in at gas mark 4 (180C/350F) and it took 5-6 minutes for all the crayons to melt enough.

When you take the tray out, all the colours will have blended but won’t have mixed to create a uniform khaki brown with luck!

Leave the tray to cool overnight, and pop them out in the morning. Great for little hands that are just developing their manual dexterity!

In other news, our eldest dressed as a headless man complete with papier mache decapitated head for Hallowe’en. Unfortunately we didn’t take any photos of the process, but here’s the end product! Excuse the homemade artwork and scrawlings on the door behind him!

Posted under for the kids, with the kids