Halloween this year was fun. Catriona "got" it, and Graeme and his friends realized that faster is better, the result of which was that I ended up walking around with Catriona while Graeme, Hank, and Zach raced ahead with Hank's mom, Kim, in tow.
Catriona had originally elected to be "Sally" from the Pixar movie "Cars". Jenn dutifully started on the costume. She put in a fair amount of work, really. And about half-way in Catriona decided that she really wanted to be Luke Skywalker. Of course she did. This was about two weeks ago.
Sally was out now. We couldn't sway her back to Sally at all. Luke was her primary focus (because of Graeme being Vader, you see) but she did mention at one point that R2D2 would be fun.
So then we (parents) find ourselves closing on on Halloween with a half-finished Sally costume, and a very determined 3.5 year old.
Jenn figured she could pull together a quick-n-dirty blue and white R2D2 costume in about an hour, and that would do for daycare the next day.
Well, Catriona absolutely LOVED it. So for Halloween night Doug drew the appropriate panels on beside the blue, and we had a somewhat recognizable R2D2.
Catriona probably said the words "R2D2" three or four times for every house we visited. She was that thrilled.
Anybody want a half-assembled Sally costume? Fits a 3 year old?
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We did a similar design to the "vampire pumpkin" a few Halloweens ago. Graeme loved the idea, so that's what we did this year.
I (Doug) wanted to try the Dremel approach to pumpkin carving because I'd seen people's postings on the Internet and liked the results. I searched around for a good design and found this pirate skull, which I thought was quite simple. (Compared to some of the complicated ones, this was very simple.)
Nobody told me how long these things take!! I'd say the prep plus carving took about 3 hours. In comparison, the one on the left took about 10-15 minutes. (plus the time Graeme spent de-gooping the big one - much appreciated.)
In the end I was really pleased with the results, and it did receive a LOT of compliments from Trick-or-Treaters. Our friend Ryk gave it the "Coolest Pumpkin of This Halloween" award of all the pumpkins he'd seen this year (Facebook post), so I was quite happy. (Thanks Ryk!)