Happy Halloween

After a super fun filled day at the office, including a field trip to a “quiet” village for trick or treating (Mum’s edit: a retirement village), we headed to our friend’s house to celebrate both her birthday and halloween in one, big, amazing party.

The party games were halloween themed.

Which included handing out candy to trick or treaters.

Then it was our turn to do some trick or treating.

So much fun.

So much fun.

With full buckets and big smiles we headed back to our friends house and stayed up really, really late which is why this post is really, really late.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Halloween Eve

Halloween Eve began with a neighbour at the door with bags of candy for Rafa and me. Happy dance! Happy dance!

We then had to get down to the business of preparations for the school parties tomorrow. We all helped Mum with making jack-o-lantern mandarin pots for Rafa’s class.

Here’s my vampire in progress (see the big fangs?!)

Even Papi was getting artistic.

For my class party we were on cups… except Mum couldn’t find any Halloween ones left so we made our own with Halloween stickers. I reckon these are way cooler than bought ones anyway.

After bath we laid out our costumes all ready for the morning. Rafa thought it was hilarious that Papi put his undies outside his pants. Spiderman doesn’t wear his undies on the outside of his pants!!

Halloween still on my mind

Over breakfast this morning, Mum and I were discussing how many syllables are in different words.  Then Mum tested me on a few:

Mum: So, can you think of a word with two syllables?

Me: pump-kin

Mum: Nice!  What about three syllables?

Me: hal-lo-ween

Mum: That’s a good one.  Can you think of any with four syllables?

Me:  El-sa-cos-tume

Halloween warm up four: pumpkin decorating

Finally we had a night spare to decorate this year’s pumpkins.

I turned mine into a princess.

And Rafa made his a “BIG pumpkin”

All finished!! Now our princess and big pumpkin are sitting by the front door.

Halloween warm up three: the spooktacular

The Cross Creek Spooktacular on “the hill” gave us another chance to wear our Halloween costumes and prepare for the big night this Friday.

The balloon lady made me a magic sceptre, just like Elsa’s, for my costume.

And Spidey used his golden sword to catch the bad guys for a change, giving his webs a much needed break!

There were crafts and face painting

Pumpkins and candy.

Spooky poems and stories.

Four more sleeps ’til Halloween! We’re sooooo excited!

All Hallows Eve Renaissance Festival

Our friends had tickets to the Texas Renaissance Festival but they couldn’t go, so fortunately for us, we got their tickets.

At the time of getting the tickets, we didn’t realise we were heading to the USA’s largest renaissance theme park. 55 acres of a 16th century European village comes alive for 8 weeks a year.

There was so much to see and do and being located almost 2 hours North of Houston half of Austin and Dallas were there too. It was HUGE and a wonderful bombardment of sights, sounds and smells.

All the shop keepers were in theme and they called us “my lord” and “my lady”

Lots of festival goers were dressed in theme too… either renaissance or this weekend’s theme of All Hallows Eve.

We did our best with a last minute raid of the dress-ups box.

There was music and dancing everywhere.

And classes on useful topics such as sword techniques.

As soon as I saw the archery I had to get some arrows and have a try.

The girl on Brave makes it look easier than it is.  Rafa got a few good shots in although I don’t think any of us tickled, let alone slayed the dragon.

We met lots of interesting people.

erm… and things?

They were all super friendly.  And not scary at all.

Many of our new friends gave us gifts like teeth and jewellery.

We were super impressed that the food wasn’t just the standard fair fare!  Papi got stuck into a turkey leg

and we demolished the fruit!

I wasn’t as convinced as the others on the scotched egg (well the boiled egg part was okay, but I accidentally dropped it half way through).

And I have no idea how I ended up with iced witches brew (maybe because it was the only non-alcoholic drink where we stopped for a break) but there were no complaints from me!

And you’ll never guess what we stumbled upon just as we were thinking it might be time to head home…

An elephant ride!!

See… I am there in the middle!

Eventually after getting side tracked by jousting and trying to convince Mum and Papi to buy us swords and shields we made it back to the car for the big drive back to Houston.

Check it out here: Texas Renaissance Festival

Halloween warm up one

At last I was finally allowed to wear my Elsa Halloween costume that has been in a not-so-secret spot in Mum’s closet for weeks.

Rafa was having difficulty throwing webs even in his Spider-get-up because he didn’t want to let go of the spiderman suit tag and mask.

A quick trip to Target…

And then onto the Festival at our sister school in Cinco Ranch.

We threw hoops onto witches hats.

And played pin the nose on the pumpkin.

With each game…

We won cool prizes like bubbles, pencils and note books, pinwheels and balloons.

A bit of a run around outside on the merry-go-round, playground and bounce house and we were pink-cheeked and ready for water and a rest.

Hand-me-down cars from my friend Kai

My new most favouritist things.

Halloween House tour part two: in the car

Armed with a list of addresses suggested by “The Ladies of Cross Creek” we jumped in the car for part two of our Halloween House tour.

We visited the spider house a few weeks ago but that was before the infestation got this out of hand (early October there was just a little family of spiders by the sidewalk but they must have got the word out that there’s a party going on and the house has gotten progressively inundated with the spider’s friends and family as Halloween approaches).

The rats are new since last time we were here. Ewwww!

We met a nice scarecrow family around the corner, they were keeping their distance from those spiders!

 

This witch looked a little ill.  We wondered what she’d eaten to be that green.

There were lots of pumpkins, ghosts, ghouls, skeletons and spiders on the tour.

I checked with Mum that the giant spider wasn’t real so it couldn’t really bite me.  I was pretty sure… but you know.

As it got darker the displays with lights looked awesome.

We’ve been booed!

It was just about bedtime last night when the door bell rang.  There wasn’t a soul in sight, but we spotted a basket of goodies on our doorstep!

It turns out, we’d been BOOed!

We helped ourselves to candy.

Whilst Mum read the note so we knew what to do next.

Tonight, we put our “we’ve been BOOed” sign up on the door.

And waited until it was dark to give Papi a big bucket of Halloween treats to on BOO an unsuspecting neighbour (he runs the fastest so we figured he was the least likely to be caught mid-mission).  A big THANK YOU to our wonderful community, BOOing is so much fun – both ways!