A Pilot, a Superhero, and Rainbow Brite

Halloween 2014! Besides being super annoyed at how even Halloween has become a season --

Everyone, stop that! Stop with your pumpkin drinks in August, stop with your Christmas music in October, stop with the Halloween parties weeks before Halloween! It is ONE DAY. The children do not need to wear their costumes and do Halloween activities at three fall festivals and then preschool class and then dance class and then choir. No. Stop. By the time it comes around, they would be over it. A class party or school event, and trick-or-treating. That's it. I put my foot down at the other things.

-- I'm actually not a scrooge, just normal, and the kids and their costumes were really fun this year. Even though none of them were Elsas. In a year when everyone was Elsa! We are basically unamerican, I know.

Charlotte wanted to be a superhero, in the generic sense apparently, and so I googled for ideas and realized I could mostly put hers together myself: I dyed a onesie and printed the C in a superhero font on iron-transfer paper (I actually ran into some snags but those are boring so that's the gist of it). I ordered some cuffs and a belt from an etsy seller, and cut up some socks for her leg decoration. She already had the cape. Came out super cute, this little Super Booler.

(We decided her kryptonite is getting her shoes on the correct feet.)

Anneliese asked to be Rainbow Brite months and months ago and I kept deterring her, because it's 2014, not 1984, and that is not a costume you can just procure unless you want to spend a zillion dollars on ebay and I obviously don't. But after many repeated asks, and many sad faces, and my friend Jeanine convincing me it wouldn't be that hard, I decided to put a Rainbow Brite together as best I could. And it was totally good!

I ordered a clearance t-shirt dress from Old Navy, which was originally a light sky blue that was easy enough to dye royal. I bought some faux fur Santa trim and glued it to the hem. I found a bow and glued a star to it. And put rainbow leg warmers on her arms and legs. Jeanine made the red belt/suspender part for us because she is the best, and I ironed a cheap etsy patch onto it. I used leftover superhero onesie fabric and cut-up ribbon to make the chest piece, which I almost omitted because it looked sloppy, but then needed it to hold the suspenders up (it's just some iron-on velcro holding it together). Pretty good for a mom who doesn't sew, right?

And Nathan wanted to be a pilot (who also designs airplanes) (I told him that costume doesn't exist so he might have to dress like just a pilot, and tell people the also-designs-planes part himself) so I did the extremely crafty mom thing of clicking through to Amazon Prime. Be very impressed.

His shirt says pilote -- in Spanish -- and I have no idea why (that's not what was on the package) but we went with it.

All the costumes don't family coordinate, and Mark and I don't like to dress up, so I know we fail the internet when it comes to Halloween, but I don't care because they all had costumes they loved and I got to feel like a halfway-crafty mom in the process.

So yeah, it was a fun Halloween. The girls did their costume parade at school on Monday (Monday?!) and then for actual Halloween we did our normal trick-or-treat loop around the block, trying the whole time to convince the kids we were going to eat all their candy when they went to bed, and replace it with vegetables, which totally gets a rise out of Nathan (but not the girls) and amuses us. We're great parents, is what I'm saying.