Halloween 2011 - From Garage to Party Palace

In the week before Halloween we start to get serious about getting ready for the party. This year I tried something new and decided to host the celebration in our garage. The weather had been pretty "iffy" throughout October and I didn't relish the prospect of having dozens of sugared up children confined to the house if it should happen to rain on the night. Also I had decided to get a bounce house. As the kids get older it becomes a bit more challenging to entertain them - though sometimes as adults I think we over stress about that one and they really would have a ball of a time just being with their friends. Anyway - the only place a commercial bounce house will fit at my house is in the drive way - and that naturally led us to having the party in the garage so all the adults could be up the front of the house keeping an eye on the kids and making sure they were well back from the road etc. etc....

So - the garage had to be emptied (that was kind of cathartic and I so liked it when I got all the "junk" that lived there out of it that I haven't yet put the "junk" back and I'm really reconsidering just how much of it I actually need.) Anything that couldn't be moved had to be incorporated into the party decorations and the whole space had to take on a "spooky but not too scary" vibe.

Here's what I came up with......

The Christmas nutcracker got the mommy treatment.....and windows were covered with spooky curtains

 The bike which hangs upside down from the ceiling scored a skeleton "clown" as a rider with a Gymbo stuffed doll riding shotgun. Liam's little bike and his scooter went on top of the cabinet with a couple of other skeletons in clown outfits riding along....

 Hay bales for seating at the party table. Lots of netting hanging from the ceiling. A few chairs for the adults (and the kids that didn't want to sit on the hay bales - they were a little prickly.) Lots of decals and card board cutouts on the walls - some purple and orange twinkly lights to add some spooky atmosphere. Barrels always can be used as props and a good collection of dangling spiders, rubber mice, and decorated craft pumpkins....

Halloween 2011 - The Indoor Decorations

As the month of October progresses the decorations start to pop up everywhere throughout the house.

The powder room...

The entry foyer...

And all throughout the house.....

Liam loves playing with the decorations. For the entire month he has a whole houseful of special "toys" that are both familiar - because they come out every year - and special - because they only come out once a year. Each year you add a few new items and it doesn't take long before you have quite the collection! And I like it that it puts the focus of the holiday on something other than candy...

Halloween 2011 Outdoor Decorations

 Ok - now I finally have some time on my hands to get back to my daily blog practice I want to catch up on what we've been up to for the last couple of months. Our Big Halloween Bash was great fun - worth all the effort to see the kids having such a fun time. A great party is all in the details - and that means starting well in advance and being prepared to use your creativity to work around limitations in everything else - the budget, the location, the weather, etc. etc.

We start prepping for Halloween with our outdoor decorations - they go up in early October. When the summer flowers in the front garden bed are spent - it lies fallow for a while until it can become a spooky graveyard.

Then Helga - the witch - makes her appearance in our coconut tree...

A couple of unlikely characters take up residence at a cocktail party in the front entryway.

And pumpkins start appearing everywhere....

The emphasis is on fun - and so I try and incorporate the traditional spooky Halloween elements but in ways that elicit smiles from the Kindergarten set. Nothing too ghoulish and lots of touches of humor (look for the spook with the toothbrush!) As I said - it's all about the details and adding an original twist to those details.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Where is the line between not raising your child to be a selfish person and being one yourself?

I think it may be more a tightrope than a line and Liam and I seem to walk it every weekend and fall of it about 3 o’clock on Sunday. It’s our witching hour, the trough of our weekly cycle, our low point.

I know this – I don’t like it and yet somehow I rarely seem to be able to prevent us from ending up there, which just frustrates the hell out of me because I know that it should be the exact opposite. It should be Monday morning you dread, right? Not Sunday afternoon.

For the first eight months of Liam’s life my beautiful niece Dominique lived with us – and so Sunday’s were the kind of day I’ve always believed they should be – fewer responsibilities and more time for fun and relaxation. But when she left and it became just Liam and me on the weekends, the departure of his nanny on Friday afternoon began a 50 to 60 hour stretch when it really was just him and me. I once saw another mother’s Facebook post in which she admitted that she hated the weekends and I felt the kind of horror that you do when someone has given voice to an unspeakable truth. To say that the time you spend alone with your child is not the most precious time of all seems like violating a basic tenet of good mothering. But six years in to my single parent experience I can still say that by the time we are hitting 40+hours of each other’s company – things are getting tense.

I know that much of the problem is based in my personality. I’m a loner, who lives mostly in my head and who always has a long list of things on my ‘to do’ list. I push at life – and by the weekend there usually ain’t a whole lot of energy left. Now that I think back to what weekends were like before Liam came along I can see that they were time I gave to myself. More often than not I didn’t engage with the rest of the world and many times I didn’t even venture outside for at least one whole day. It was my time to unplug, to destress, to stop. To recharge.