Happy Halloween!

Alex has become full-on crazy about Halloween. This year we decorated the front of the house with spider webs and a ghost garland. He made two goofy pumpkins. And trick-or-treating was a major highlight.

Dave reminded me that Alex started talking about being a bat for Halloween shortly after last Halloween. That idea stuck, although it evolved a bit. When he started talking about what he wanted to be for Halloween a couple of months ago, it started as a bat, then became a vampire bat, then became a vampire dressed as a bat, and finally he landed on Dracula disguised as a bat. I'm not quite sure where the concept came from, but we ran with it.

Continuing the tradition started last year, Alex and Dave are the costume makers. The bat involved less building than last year's robot, but it definitely had more conceptual kinks to work out. Dave made a great mask that was a bat itself, complete with pointy ears, eyes, and wings. However, Alex thought the mask needed to just be the face of the bat and declared that the wings "didn't make any sense." We waited until the last minute, but, much to Dave's chagrin, the wings had to be cut off.

Alex also became particularly obsessed with the fangs. He really wanted fangs. I really didn't want to have him use plastic fangs. He came up with a creative, if bizarre-looking solution on his own. One day, out of the blue, he sat at his art table and made fangs out of paper. They pointed in different directions and had a purple circle (the mouth?) in between. Ok, but I still wasn't sure how they would get used. But, this was not my project. A few days later I discovered that the fangs had been glued to the front of the bat mask. Problem solved.

His original plan for trick-or-treating was to go door-to-door for ten minutes, then hand out candy for ten minutes, but when the night finally came he was a little more focused on going door-to-door. When we came back to hand out candy, he was excited, but the slow traffic disappointed him. He kept going out to the sidewalk like a carnival barker trying to drum up business. "Candy here!" "You can come here for some candy!" "We have candy!"

I've never been a huge Halloween fan, but this year showed me just how much fun it can be to a kid.

Alex and his silly pumpkins 

Alex being a silly pumpkin

Dracula disguised as a bat

Spooky bat!