Halloween Highlight

During my Halloween Wrap-up, I neglected to post this awesome video of Ava's sweet dance moves:



Now that's what I call a "dancing baby".

Halloween Wrap-up 2

On the "big day", we were ready to take our two trick-or-treaters out on the streets. Ava donned her chicky costume, and Aidan was the blue ranger once again.



Everything was going great until the blue ranger shot the chicky:



But he felt bad about it and laid down with her to make her feel better:



Here's Ava at her first house, getting her first treat:



Here she is showing it to me so I can check it for razor blades:



Jessica and I had a couples costume this year, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. PS-I'm the wolf.

Halloween Wrap-up 1

Well, we survived through another Halloween this year. The kids were both old enough this year to do trick-or-treating, so it was a fun for everybody.

Jessica and the kids went to a Halloween party on Thursday at the library on post; kind of a "pre-game" to the big event. Aidan wanted to be a Power Ranger, despite all pleading to let me make him a cool costume like last year. Here he is, decked out as the Blue Ranger:



Ava had two costumes; one we bought and one we borrowed from our neighbor. This is the borrowed one:



Thursday night was pumpkin carving night, or "pun-kins" as Aidan calls them. We had two pumpkins this year, and Jessica and I each took a hand at carving one. Jessica went more traditional with hers.



Aidan had been given a Marvel comic pumpkin pattern book at his birthday party. So he wanted me to carve a pumpkin from one of the patterns. Naturally, he picked the one with the "Challenging" tag. Here's me toiling over this pumpkin masterpiece:



The final product of our carving efforts:



Next post will be the wrap-up from Halloween day.

Halloween Super Costume Fun!

We're getting ramped up for Halloween at the Springer house. It's one of our favorite holidays. Since we're overseas, the costume selection is limited to what's at the on-post Army store. And that's pretty poor. So we turn to the interwebs to find costumes for the kids and us.

As we were looking around for something cute for the kids, we found some unusual specimens out there. First up, the "plus-size" costumes. Now, I'm not just making fun of fatties. I realize that fat people want to participate in Halloween too, and they need a costume just like everyone else. However, here's a plus-size costume that truly, truly horrifies me:



Ughhn! This is the "Be My Baby Jammies Plus Size Blue Adult" costume. Horrifying. It's available from Buycostumes.com, and includes the "Got Milk" bib. Yuck.

Next up are baby costumes. Now there's a ton of cute baby costumes out there: animals, little superheroes, little fruits. Here's one particular costume that I wanted to share just because the kid's face tells a whole story:



If I had to caption this photo, it'd have to be "who farted?". Priceless.

More than meets the eye

First off, big thanks to my parents for turning around a package to me very quickly. I had ordered something from Amazon (you'll see it in a minute) that they wouldn't ship to Italy. What might this piece of contraband be that Amazon, in their unrelenting corporate responsibility, saw fit to prohibit from shipping to Italy? Explosives? No. Demolition how-to manuals? Of course not. High end computer technology? Closer.

It's the Optimus Prime voice changing helmet, of course! What would happen if this fell into the wrong hands? Here's Aidan, totally enamoured with his new toy:





Wow. Pretty cool. And it can be adjusted to fit adult heads too. As soon as Halloween is over, this baby is mine. Which brings me to my next issue: Halloween costumes.

This year, I took it as a labor of love to make Aidan's Halloween costume myself. I enjoy making stuff like that, and thought this would be a good opportunity to flex that creative muscle. So at the beginning of the month, when Aidan asked for a Transformer costume, I knew I had my work cut out for me. After two weeks spending some free time in the garage, I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After having cut and fit the chest plate, shoulder, and arm pieces from scrap cardboard, last night I went for the initial paint. Here's what that looked like:



The chest piece is laying flat here, but it folds up to make an Optimus-looking body for a 4 year old. I covered the cardboard in clear packing tape, because the paint coated it well and gave the tape a glossy metallic look. More robot-y. I'll have more pics as I get it together and have Aidan put it on. But once that happens, we might not get it off of him again.