Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Happy Halloween!


If you can't understand the words of the song, here's what it says

Old MacDonald had a ghost who lived behind a post.
On Halloween he came to play.  He scared the kids away.
With a boo, boo here
And a boo, boo there
Here a boo, there a boo, everywhere a boo, boo
Sun came up, the ghost ran fast for Halloween had passed.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Will's 7th Birthday

Amazingly, even with having a child whose birthday falls less than a week before Halloween, we've never thrown Will a Halloween-themed birthday party.  Until this year.  It was chaotic, noisy, and exhausting (at least for me and Bill), but I think Will and his friends had fun.

GAMES
There are so many Halloween games you can play that it took me a while to find ones that were age-appropriate and wouldn't take a lot of time planning or executing.  We started off with a little dance party to Halloween music.  This allowed the kids to jump around and get wiggles out, as well as let Bill set up for another game.  Unfortunately all the pictures I took of them dancing were too dark or too blurry.

Then we had a game I guess you could call "Build the Skeleton."  We divided the kids up into teams, gave them a bunch of paper bones, and had them put the skeletons back together in the right order.  It ended up being boys vs. girls, and the boys were super fast.  That may have to do with the fact that Alice, Kayla and Esther weren't really into the game, but who knows.
  

The next game was the classic "Doughnut on a String."  Whether accidentally or not, Bill made the strings a little too high for most of the kids, so it was really funny watching them try to eat the doughnuts. 

After all the doughnuts had either fallen off or been eaten, we resurrected an idea from last year and had the kids make spiders out of Oreo's and licorice.  This was by far the most popular activity of the party. 

Then it was time for presents.  Will received a number of nice gifts, the most popular being related to Transformers and Star Wars.


And finally we had cake and ice cream.  Will requested a pumpkin cake.  I've always struggled with making and decorating cakes, so I was pretty proud of how this one turned out. 





Here's a picture of Will and his friends.  Among the bunch we had a princess, a dog, two Transformers, a skeleton, a giraffe, and a Power Ranger.

And here is a picture of Kayla enjoying the remainder of her cake and ice cream amidst the aftermath of the chaos.



Happy Birthday Will!