Haunted House For Sale!

 It's been just as busy a week as it was this past weekend. Let's face it, perhaps I really can't update this stupid blog every day. 

Watch, as soon as I say something like that, I'll do another 365 day blogging challenge or something outrageous. 

This week was full of Halloween crafts, because obviously. My favorite was a two-day haunted house activity. The first day we painted a moonlit sky scene using various shades of purple. After it dried (the next day actually), we used construction paper to create a template for a haunted house to glue onto the moonlit scene. Then, as part of a writing project for school, the kids had to write a "For Sale" ad about their haunted house, being as outlandish and ridiculous (and creepy) as humanly possible (while staying relevant). 

Calen's "Hotel" (as he described it) features 35 floors and 820 bathrooms, drawbridge, levitating tables, witches for housekeeping, and a  627 degree hot tub.

Camden's mansion features 999 bedrooms, a cemetery back yard, piranhas in the hot tub, a fuzzy wampa carpet and a vampire butler, of course. 

Yesterday we took the handful of toilet paper rolls that I've been hoarding and painted them purple, then the boys cut out their own bat wings and glued eyeballs on to turn them into a unique little bat family. Add some hole punch holes on the bottom and we strung them up upside down in the dining room. 

I mean, everyone should decorate their dining room with toilet paper rolls. 

Today our friends came over and we decorated our first big batch of Halloween cookies! The dining room table was completely overrun with two dozen cookies, frosting tubes, sprinkles and candy eyeballs (but of course), and half a dozen kids completely out of their minds in the upward spiral of a sugar rush. 
 

The Weekend

 Apparently I'm too busy on the weekends to actually pay attention to this blog so I have to do a 3 day catch up. 

Fridays we don't have a full day of school other than a quick spelling and math test, so we try to keep it open-ish. Two weeks ago we started a Friday tradition of a creative writing assignment using story dice, and as luck would have it, my Amazon order of new story dice arrived the night before. Special for October (of course), I ordered "Ghost Story Dice" so the boys could try their hand at some fun and not-so-scary stories. These dice were the same as their previous "Pirate" dice, in that you roll a set of 9 dice and the pictures that are face up are required to be a part of your story. The ghost stories were a smash hit, and for fun I thought I'd start sharing one or the other's story each week. Here's Camden's super cute ghost story for this week:

Once upon a scary time, I lived with a witch named Mary and a Vampire named Dracula and some elves to keep me company. Our house guard was a headless horseman that I hypnotised to be friendly. We live in a haunted house on a swamp.

Today Mary is teaching me how to fly a broom. I was a pro on the first try and it was so fun! I felt the big cold breeze on my face. I touched the clouds, they were so fluffy and I brought a piece of a cloud to the ground and showed the Mary the witch. The witch and the vampire are basically my Mom and Dad, except a Mom that knows magic and a Dad that has long canines and drinks blood soda.

Dracula taught me how to turn into a bat and I did it and my vampire canines moved in my teeth, but I didn't want to taste the taste of blood. My headless horseman guard taught me how to ride my black horse named NightShade. The elves taught me how to jump high like them. I looked in the mirror and saw my sharp canines. Then I went to bed.

The next morning zombies came to attack and my headless horseman guard killed a couple and then I got on Night Shade my horse. I grabbed my hockey stick and started hitting zombies heads like "Whack! Whack!" and then they were dead.

It was 12 o'clock and past my bedtime so I said good night to Mary and Dracula and drifted off to sleep.

The end. 

For a boy of 9 that can't stand writing, these story blocks have really changed his perspective on how storytelling can be fun. 

And if I don't tell him that he's actually learning while doing such writing, then it remains a positive experience for both of us. 

Later Friday evening we made "knuckle pumpkin patches", which is simply, drawing some rolling hills in light colored pencil, then painting your knuckle orange and stamping them all over the paper and adding some darker lines and vines to make a pumpkin patch. The kids LOVED this art project. I loved taping it to our pantry doors. 

Fast forward to Saturday now. Saturday was a BUSY day. After 3 weeks of rain, clouds, wind, more rain, and did I mention rain, the sun came out and it was a beautiful fall day. Three of us families decided to get our kids out of the house and hike up a mountain, because what else do you do in Alaska on a sunny day. We headed up a 9 mile roundtrip hike with our 10 kids in tow and made it up to a beautiful alpine lake (Shelly Lake). We had to keep wrangling in Camden and his bestie Amelia, because them and their endless energy and strong hockey legs would have been miles ahead of us slow draggers if we let them. It took all day and we were plum exhausted by the end of it, but it was a great day with great friends and fantastic views. 

Sunday (today) it was once again rainy and disgusting out, a perfect day to sit on the sofa basically all day and be completely worthless. Okay fine I took a Lysol wipe to the kitchen counters and ran a load through the wash, but otherwise useless. We did pull out a new Halloween jigsaw puzzle that my mom sent us, which we've discovered Cam is completely obsessed with puzzles, as he sat there for an hour and a half trying to find all the edge pieces. Later after dinner, instead of our traditional Sundae Sunday, we made caramel apple nachos, with apple slices, caramel, candy corns, peanut butter bites and sprinkles, and watched Hotel Transylvania. That was as much excitement as my post-mountain-hiking bones could handle anyways. 

This Is Halloween

 It's October 1st and that means Halloween has quite literally exploded in our house. I mean, we only get 31 days to enjoy the decorations, so they better go up the first day of the month. Brad pulled down all 8 totes of Halloween decor from the garage the night before and by the time he came home this afternoon, the candy corn lights were up, the eyeball tree (yes we have an eyeball tree) was decorated, and the outdoor electric jack o lantern's were lashed to the front porch. 

Hey, when it blows 70mph every week during yet another random day of "Alaskan weather", you need to tie down basically everything involving outdoor decorations. 

We try to make Octobers super packed full of activities. Crafts and holiday treats are my absolute favorite thing ever and so every year as the holiday season rolls around and the kids are still happy and willing to do crafts, I'm taking full advantage of it, bucko. 

Today we started 31 Days of Halloween in a simple matter by spending the better portion of the day unloading totes and stringing up lights and decorations. It's fun doing this while the kids are home this year, because they would watch me open a tote and exclaim "Oh! I forgot we have that!" which made me question whether we had too much Halloween decorations, and then I laughed at myself because there's no such thing as too much. 

Frankenstein does math lessons

Decorating the eyeball tree!

In the evening, we made our first batch of Monster Munch. This is a precise and careful concoction of....basically whatever we have laying around that can be mixed together in a sort of white trash Halloween themed Chex Mix. Today we used plain popcorn as the base, added some pumpkin spice caramel corn (that I shamelessly bought online from Target), candy corn, Muddy Buddies, and "Vampire Kisses" (Hershey kisses with strawberry filling), and purple and orange sprinkles. 

Monster Munch complete, we dove into our Halloween pajamas (an annual tradition), oozed around the house pretending to be mummy's and skeletons and then watched our first Halloween movie of the year: Nightmare Before Christmas (a big family favorite) and then spent the rest of the evening singing "What's This?!" as it was inevitably stuck in our heads.

 

When mummies attack

It's going to be a great month!