A Joyschool Halloween

One of the reasons I love Joyschool so much is that the program builds around the natural events in life. When it was fall we learned about where food comes from and enjoyed picking and eating the last of my mother-in-laws tomatoes. So when Halloween rolled around, the program again came through for me since I'm not so good at finding time for fun seasonal art projects or silly songs. The week before Halloween all the mothers gathered at the end of one of the lessons to watch them do a parade in their costumes and perform their little songs. That's Isaac there in the middle (yes in the very-safe-for-trick-or-treating BLACK costume)

Okay so I'm a pushover. Our house has been obsessed with everything dragon for a very long time and specifically the dragons on the movie How to Train Your Dragon. Isaac loves the main one named toothless (although he does have teeth). Of course they do sell commercial costumes of these characters but they have masks and they even scare me. And the dragons in the movie aren't mean or scary and I didn't feel like putting this on my 2 year old so I agreed to ATTEMPT to make a Toothless costume. I realize I never got a good picture after all the work, but Isaac loved it.

And he's pretty dang cute in it. I really just made the hood out of fleece and sewed on the eyes, teeth, ears, etc., and then the wings. The body was just black sweats with blue sparkly puffy paint to make the scales. Yeah I said JUST twice in the last paragraph but really JUST took me almost 3 weeks of naptimes.

Ethan also wanted to be a dragon- but he wanted be the one called A Hideous Zippleback. If you have no clue what that is, it's a green TWO-HEADED dragon. I told Ethan that I would TRY to make Isaac's and that if I could then I'd TRY to make his. When I finally finished Isaac's with a week to spare, I had to inform Ethan that there was no way I could do his. To which he replied "that's okay, can I be a Star War's guy?". Quickly jumping on the bandwagon (knowing I could easily BUY a star wars costume) I agreed and asked him which character he'd like to be. Now just so you have a little background, Ethan has never actually seen ANY of the Star Wars movies. He only knows the characters from the Wii game he plays with his dad and in that game you get to be every character and none of them are evil. So he has no clue who is who or who is bad, he just likes the ones he likes. So which OF ALL the characters available to him, would he choose? Apparently General Grievous. I innocently asked him who that is and he replied "oh he's the guy with FOUR arms and FOUR light sabers. He's really cool!" Oh great, so first you wanted a 2-headed dragon which I couldn't buy or make and NOW you want a 4-armed, 4-light-saber guy that I can't buy or make either. Should I stop being such a pushover and just tell my kids what to be??? Tragically I think Ethan's too old for that.

So off we went to a costume store where everything was WAY overpriced and Ethan wasn't too impressed with what they had. We ended up at Walmart afterwards and stumbled upon dress-up trunks that I'm sure aren't meant for Halloween but Ethan (having definitely inherited my senses of frugality) fell in love with the trunk that had THREE costumes in it for less than the price of ONE Star Wars costume.

So meet Iron Man Isaac, Wolverine Ethan, and Spider Man next-door Ethan. My Ethan chose to go as Wolverine (although again I feel like a bad mother since he has ABSOLUTELY no clue who Wolverine is, just thinks he looks cool and is a superhero so he must be cool). And the great thing is his costumes keep getting used and they love it.

And for your viewing pleasure... First you take a pumpkin and I'm a mean old witch!