Happy Halloween!

 Random costumes that aren't actually their Halloween costumes but were rediscovered in the dress up box? Check.

Pumpkins carved? Yup.

 Sister photobombed? Sure.

 LED candles have batteries? Yes!

All ready, have a great All Hallows Eve, and we'll see you tomorrow with costumes!

Biohazards!

 Tonight is Scary Movie Night!  This is an annual event with the scout troop, and this will be the second year it's been held at our house (this year's scary movie: Raiders of the Lost Ark).

This is the first time Mxyl has been a patrol leader (troops are broken down into smaller patrols).  His troop has two patrols, the Bats, and the Biohazards.


Can you tell which patrol Mxyl and Zorg are in?

Can you guess who came up with the idea of having Biohazard patrol?

The third (honorary) Biohazard is Klenda, naturally.

Considering the costume, maybe we should say, "unnaturally..."

At any rate, the costumes were easy peasy and will look great under black light!

They are painters coveralls (less than $10 at Home Depot), randomly splotched with fluorescent green and yellow spray paint.

Oh yes, we did masks and gloves, some of which we had, but that still kept the total (per costume) under $10.

For the biohazard symbol, I had to look it up on the internet.  I traced half of it on piece of paper (held up to the monitor) so that I could make it as large as possible.

Then I laid the half symbol on a folded, larger piece of paper (mine was a store circular done on stiff paper) and cut away the symbol on the folded side.  It opened into a stencil that I used with black spray paint on the kids.

Did I mention that all spraying was done with the kids wearing the costume?  Naturally, since they were wearing painter's coveralls and masks,  they were completely  protected from paint.  I, of course, was not...

Why does this never occur to me until after the fact?

On the plus side, these costumes actually are (except for shoe covers and eye protection) fully functioning biohazard suits for most biological contaminants...

Costumes

 Here we have Klenda as St. Dorothy, an early martyr.  On the way to her execution, someone laughed at her for saying she was going to heaven's garden, and wanted her to send him some fruit.

After her execution, an angel showed up at his door with 3 golden apples and three golden roses!

 Leena was St. Mary Magdalene...  She's traditionally depicted with a cross and a skull because she is contemplating Jesus' sacrifice and the shortness of our lives.

Usually the skull is not so creepy, however.

Also, she kept losing it, and we were constantly looking for Leena's skull.

 This was Mxyl's first year on the other side of the door - he liked giving out the candy and seeing all the kids in costumes.

He himself is dressed as a more modern looking St. Michael. 

Why have St. Michael always dressed like a Roman soldier?

The only down side was that one young trick or treater thought he was dressed as "a dead soldier..."  Ummmm. NO!

 Choclo wanted to be St. George, so, of course, Oob wanted to be St.  George. 

Fourteen years and four boys later, we probably own enough knightly garb to have all six kids be St. George, so this was not a problem!

Plus they could whack each other while waiting for everyone else to get ready.





Zorg went as Daniel, complete with pet lion.

We had just finished reading the book of Daniel, so Zorg was very authentic. 

He began every statement to me with, "O Mom, live forever!"

The Sojourn in Egypt Part III, or, It's a Wrap!

We didn't actually do everything I had thought we might, but we did food. We made flat bread (but didn't put sand in it, I was thinking of it for authenticity...) and date-honey candy (yum!).

We skipped the costumes, but then, a lot of Egyptians at the time skipped the costumes, too.

We made cat statues! Paper mache around water bottles. That was fun!

We made shabti (small statues buried with the dead to do all their manual labor in the after life) out of grated soap. You grate the soap (we used Ivory), wet your hands and then mold the soap. After it hardens a bit, you can carve the details. I couldn't quite get the camera to show the details on ours. Actual shabti are sort of plain and mummy like also.

We really liked the grated soap thing - it lends itself to all sorts of sculpturing possibilities! Alas, I used my food processor to grate the soap and it was really tough to clean out and tossing it into the dish washer was not the right move. Unless you like your dishwasher to foam at the mouth.

On the plus side, unlike most craft projects, they can be recycled as soap!

The Grand Plan called for a fabulous finish: A play in which one of the Zoomlians was mummified. This would use the outfits we didn't do, and tie everything together in a memorable way which demonstrated their thorough grasp of the subject.

But we got distracted, so we're just going to wrap all the kids in toilet paper and call it a day.

Getting Ready for Halloween

 It's almost here!

 We've been painting pumpkins and webbing up the front porch.

This year we have a lot of actual spiderwebs which have been building up over the past month.  I'm not sure where the actual spiders came from, but the real and fake webs can stay for another week!

We will carve the pumpkins this weekend, which probably means roasted pumpkin seeds: yum!

I think I might also cook one of the eating pumpkins, maybe for pie,, or maybe to make candied pumpkin (double yum!).

Choclo and Oob haven't chosen costumes yet, which is fine by me.  I learned a long time ago not to set up costumes too early - they will invariably be tired of them and make something else at the last minute.

The older Zoomlians have picked out the candy they will be giving out, so the critical part is done!

Happy All Saints (Plus Halloween Pictures)

 Happy All Saints Day!

And we had a happy All Hallows (Saints) Eve last night.

Oob decided to be a "Poor Soul" (someone in purgatory).  Choclo went with an anonymous saint - a ghost with a halo.

Since Choclo had been the Poor Soul last year (I guess he made it to heaven this year!), we had that costume. 

Choclo's costume this year was just a sheet with eye holes, but it was a tremendous hit with all the houses he went to.

I think it had something to do with the fact that virtually all kids wear store bought costumes nowadays.  His was certainly the only home made costume to show up  at our house (out of more than 50 kids).

So I guess the costume of last resort from my childhood, is now the retro ironic chic of his childhood.  Not that it mattered, he just liked the costume!

Speaking of liking, Klenda carved a pumpkin on her pumpkin!

And we forgot to carve Zorg's pumpkin, and then he wasn't into it, so I got to carve my own pumpkin!

It's the pig in the white chair.

Saint costumes from other years here.

Costumes

 We made it!

All kids on deck for All Hallows Eve!

This year, Klenda graduated to candy giver along with Mxyl.  One of the fringe benefits of this is picking out the candy we give. And eating it, of course!



This is our crew of saints and so forth for 2012.

 Klenda was St. Agnes (her lamb is obscuring her authentic Roman pallium).  Leena was St. Cecelia (she's playing her harp).



 Choclo was St. Patrick. A very happy St. Patrick!







Zorg was Moses (Yes!  I knit that beard!)







Oob was St. Michael.   And very serious about it.
Evidently, he believes St. Michael does not smile.







Mxyl was Space Ghost.

Oh, no, I mean SAAAAIIINNNT  GHOOOOOST!

UPDATE: Choclo made it through the trick-or-treating, but got hit with the stomach bug later that night.  It's all about the timing!

Superhero Week

 We have been celebrating Superhero Week this week!

We've been doing lots of fun things like battling laundry monsters and answering "HERE I COME TO SAVE THE DAAAAAY!" every time we are called.

We also have been designing characters on index cards for a card game we are making up (as we go along), and, of course, making all kinds of costumes.

My favorite activity, however, has been this one: I traced each of the kids and let them color in the outline as a super hero.  Then we cut them out and taped them all over the house!

This one is Shadowman from Zorg.  He is very strong and skillful, and has the ability to become a shadow. In his shadow form he can move as quickly as a shadow, and he can also become intangible, as well as invisible among other shadows!

This one is Leena's.  She is Acitage!  She  has a gun that shoots a special acid that doesn't effect living tissue.  Thus it doesn't actually hurt evil doers, but it does dissolve non living things like fur and hair.  She also has super spiky boots which she can use to kick people and super spiky bangs which she can also use as a weapon!

 This is Crombie, as described by Choclo.  He destroys all criminals in his path! He's his favorite own self.  He wanted to eat a hundred hot potatoes, but they couldn't hurt him.(?)  His hand is metal.  He has a big dangerous whip. He can pull a spear out of his metal hand and he can scare away his enemies by making a big scary noise!



And this one by Oob does not have a name, but he does fight bad guys. Oob tells me: He's pretty short and he has gems.  The gems don't do anything, they just look nice.  He's a lot powerful.

 This one is Animalass, and she was made by Klenda: She has the power to turn into any animal, and can talk to animals while she's human. 

This hero is by Mxyl: This fellow never had any powers; he was just a relatively average guy who always wanted to be a superhero, but never had the right materials.

He once entered his room and found that one of his CDs was broken.  Out of pure curiosity, he threw the CD at his dart board as though it were a shuriken, and as almost an omen it crashed into the bull's-eye mark, shattering the CD into a thousand pieces!

That moment was an inspiration to him.  It took him years of training, collecting and more-than-slightly damaging CDs to become an entirely new superhero.  His mother fully approved and made him his own costume.  From that moment onward, he was a real-life Batman; a champion of justice; a man whose determination no villain could hope to stop: Broken CD Man!

He wears half of a CD as a mask, and has several gadgets, including grappling hooks (three CD halves make for a perfect grappling claw), and a CD-scrambling device (after he was officially recognized by the public he was given a device that can rewrite CDs to 'say' anything he wants, or just break them.  It's very useful for espionage).

Awesome History: Julius Caeser

 Our art project was dressing up as Romans.  I have to admit, this was super easy for us because I still had all the costumes from our Plutarch party, including the adult ones (which the teens needed to wear). But, really, Roman wear is simple.

Here are Leena and Klenda, each dressed in a pallium and stolla.

The pallium is a tube, pinned at the shoulders (the long sleeves are non historical undershirts).  In certain eras, the pallium is folded over at the top like the one Leena is wearing.

Either pallium can be wrapped with crisscrossing ribbons to give a belt and the top shape.

 The stolla is a shawl which can be worn like a regular shawl or elegantly draped over the back of the hair.

We only used color on the stolla (random sheets of extra fabric), but in real life, the palliums would have been colorful, too.  In fact, senators wore white with a purple stripe, and candidates wore all white (to show they were "candid" - "candida" is white in Latin).

Yeah, I know, all the classical statues are white, but that turns out to be because all the paint has worn off.  Romans liked bright colors!

Here we have Oob in a himation - a simplified toga.  Why yes, it is just a sheet wrapped around him!  True togas are easy to replicate (just sew two sheets end to end) and fiendishly difficult to put on.

The actual toga wearers were the senators, and they had slaves trained specifically for the task.

We also have a friend dressed as a praetorian guard!

Here is the same friend with Zorg (also in a himation), looking at a Lego Star Wars book (possibly not historically accurate).

The active activity was "When in Rome," kind of a Simon Says game where everyone has to imitate the Emperor player.

The food was a Roman feast!  We had dates, grapes, hard boiled eggs and flat round bread with honey.

Story of the World chapters 34-37.

Costumes!

 Leena was St. Elizabeth Ann Seton!

 Oob was St. Michael!

Yes, we have had a few St. Michaels over the years.

 Choclo wanted to be Ezekiel. 

Ezekiel?  Like the Old Testament prophet?

Yes, like the dry bones!

If you've ever taken the tour of the Franciscan Monastery, they have a "purgatory chapel" which has a wall sized mosaic of Ezekial and the plain of dried bones coming to life.

Evidently, it made a big impression!

Those were the kids old enough to go trick or treating. 

In other news, the older Zoomlians dressed like an adorable older couple and went reverse trick or treating!

 It was great!!!  They gave out a ton of candy and had a wonderful time!

Hope you had a happy Halloween!