School Halloween Parade

October 28, 2010

Halloween Parade!

Or should I say....

Character Storybook Day (what the...!).

At Talmage and Eric's school this year, they did not recognize or celebrate

Halloween. Instead, they celebrated "Storybook Character Day".

How lame is that? VERY!

Each child was to dress up as their favorite story book character and bring the book with them to school.

They also made it clear that the kids were not to dress up as scary or gruesome

characters as that may be too overwhelming for some of the other school children.

Since my children have been the tiniest of tots they have loved to dress up as

zombies and ghouls. Their Halloween costumes were not complete until they had

at least one bleeding open wound on their body.

This year we had to tone down our costumes, which to my kids equaled "tone down the fun".

If they couldn't be something dead, near death, or dying, why even dress up?

Luckily, we had these fabulous Jack Sparrow and Mad Hatter hats from our recent excursion to Disneyland. I went on line and found a fabulous Jack Sparrow costume. Halloween would be saved! I then started looking for a Mad Hatter costume but couldn't find ANYTHING!

I had to channel my inner Vivienne Westwood and come up with something good.

I could tell Eric was disappointed that his mom was going to "make" his costume,

while Talmage would be adorned in non-hokey pirate garb, I couldn't disappoint him!

The pressure... of creating... a costume...

I made a trip to our local Good Will store, a trip to Hobby Lobby, and a trip to good ol' reliable Walmart and came up with this...

I was actually quite pleased with myself! And the best part is that Eric LOVED it!

When he put it on he immediately went into character. Which character that is, I'm still not sure, but some version of his own Mad Hatter.

You can see that my kids take their Halloween-ing quite seriously.

Even Talmage transforms into his moody, sullen, pirate self for our photo session.

Here are some of our neighbors and friends we saw at Storybook Character Day.

I'm pictured with my neighbors Camila, and Cathy. Their daughters Kiera, and Emily are pictured with Maidie. And then we saw Cameron, Ashwin, Logan and Jocelyn in the parade!