Getting Ready for Halloween!

We are preparing for Halloween today and are keeping it simple, as overall most of my energy is focused on trip planning for our upcoming 3 month 'Escape the Winter and Take Swedish Parent Leave Trip' to the USA and Florida.

But that's okay. One great thing about 4 year olds is they are all for the simple things. Swedegirl woke up ready to carve pumpkins first thing, but we are waiting for her dad to get home from work, so we had to fill the day with other Halloween-y things. I was going to see what was out there by searching the internet, but there so many choices and complex crafts to find , it's easy to get overwhelmed and just not do anything at all. So we reached for the paper and paint and kept it real simple, doing what was in our minds instead of looking for some fancy craft instructions. And it was super fun, she was more than happy to just play with creating paper pumpkins. I feel a need to enculturate her with certain American things associated with Halloween she is not exposed to here. I got on youtube to try to play her the Monster Mash Song, but the visuals were too scary. She started asking for "Princess Halloween' stuff- code for not scary, please! So I found tamer, more appropriate things to offer her...

Instead of Monster Mash with pictures of scary monster lab pictures, KidSongs One Eyed One Horned Flying Purple People eater was more up our alley this year.

And while SwedeGirl also finds Charlie Brown and The Great Pumpkin too scary and weird, this part is okay:

We decided on our costumes late in the game. I thought we were simply going to raid the princess dress up costumes and leave it at that. But inspired by the creepy crawly baby, we thought SwedeBaby should be the Itsy Bitsy Spider. Soon the copy cat SwedeGirl wanted to be a spider too, and then she wanted us to be a WHOLE SPIDER FAMILY... so alas I got sewing, and sacrificed every pair on black panty hose or tights in the house to make spider legs. I have to say I felt almost virtuous making a homemade costume when I had expected to throw a store made on the kid and not dress up myself.

Getting into The Spirit of Things, we decided to make magic wands/ power sticks/ dream catchers. To keep away the evil spirits, ward of bad dreams, channel good ones, and use our spide-y talents as weavers of the web. SwedeGirl got into this...I used a birch we had recently cut down and made a base, and she wove pink and purple thread through hers while I covered mine in red thread. We talked about the Day of the Dead and our ancestors as we did this.  I told her about all the people who came before us that make our life possible, and talked some dead relatives. She even was able to think of a few to honor I had forgotten to mention.