Happy Halloween!

Okay, so I know Halloween can be a gray area for Christians...lots of people on both sides of the fence and some who can't decide which side to be on so they ride in the middle. Personally, I love the holiday.  Love the origins?  Not so much.  But like many holidays, the origins have been convoluted and what we celebrate leaves barely a shadow of the original intentions visible.  So what I'm saying is...I love to dress up!  Actually, now that I have kids I love to dress them up.  Little, little kids are the best because they don't have an opinion on what they should be, so you can come up with a clever costume scheme and force them to be a part of it.  Hee, hee, hee. (You can't see me, but I'm rubbing my hands together sinisterly.)

So my clever costume scheme this year?  Well, you can't call it my clever scheme, because this year my idea (like most of my ideas lately) came from the wonderful world of Pinterest.  Despicable Me has been an all-time favorite at our house for the past few years, and with the second one coming out I thought minions would be the perfect costume for these boys.  After all, most of their antics are strangely similar to those of the little yellow dudes from the movie.  And don't worry...I wasn't going to leave Gregg out.  We needed a Gru.  I mean, c'mon...doesn't this look like my crew?



Please don't think me a horrible person when I confess this next part, but when I found out Halloween fell on a Wednesday I was a little bit bummed.  "Why?" you ask.  Wednesday is AWANA night.  Most churches offer some sort of trick-or-treating alternative on Halloween and our church is no different.  We planned on doing our AWANA Family Fun night on Halloween complete with carnival games and candy.  Sounds fun, yeah, I know.  But there was one catch...costume restrictions.  The deal was you had to come as either a Bible character or one of God's creatures (ie. an animal of some sort), so herein lies my disappointment...no minions for us this year.  Normally this wouldn't phase us too much...we'd just skip the church scene and go trick-or-treating.  (Seriously, I'm not a horrible person.)  But since G and I are in AWANA leadership this year, we didn't even see not going as on option.  So on to new costume ideas.

Cupcakes before the party?  Gosh, we're horrible parents.

We had a few old costumes lying around.  Will was a lion for Halloween a few years ago, so I figured that would work for Micah.  Easy.  Done.  But a Bible character for Will?  All I could think of was a former pastor who told us about their boys' take on Bible character costumes.  Over the years they had a few interesting ones...John the Baptist.  Not so weird, right?  Oh, wait...after he was beheaded.  And Jonah.  Again not so weird, unless it was after he was puked up by the whale.  Oh, I miss you guys (you know who you are)!  Gregg did have another idea. "Let's put a sandwich board on him with 'Repent! The End is Near!' on it."  Another John the Baptist idea.  Funny, but I didn't figure anyone else would appreciate it as much as we did.  So back to the drawing board...or Pinterest, I mean.  (I'm beginning to think I really do have a problem.)  Now I love Pinterest...obviously, but it failed me on the Bible character costume front.  I had to use regular Google.  Pssh, honestly...after how far we've come.  Either way, we found this cute costume that had a kid with a cardboard Ark attached to him.  Yay, Noah!  One problem...I was trying to come up with this idea on Halloween morning....no time to make an Ark.  Then another brilliant idea from the engineer.  "Why don't you just tie a bunch of stuffed animals to him and he can still be Noah?"  Hmm.  I knew I married you for a reason.

So, Noah it was!  Unfortunately getting Will to go along with it was a whole other issue.  All his buds at school were Captain America or Spiderman or something else really cool that I don't even know about.  Noah?  To a five year old...not so cool.  He whined the whole time he had it on.  "This isn't my favorite."  I once heard there was a study that concluded people found the sound of a child whining something like ten times more annoying than fingernails on a chalkboard.  I completely concur.  So after about ten minutes of that I asked him, "You wanna be the lion instead?"  YES!!!!!  Fine, costume swap.  Thankfully the lion was a little big on Micah and actually still fit Will really well.  And since most of the stuffed animals were Micah's, it wasn't too hard to convince him either.  So here's what we came up with.

Noah and a few of his animal friends

Will with his best scary lion face

Will got these vampire teeth from his school party which actually worked perfectly for lion teeth.  The bling? I have no clue where that idea came from...that's all him.  Noah didn't turn out half-bad, either.  Gregg actually said it was the cutest costume we've ever come up with.  (Pat on the back, Team Schmidt!)  Best part about it?  FREE!!!  Mom's scarf and sweater, Dad's old white tee, some flippy flops and you got yourself a pretty adorable Noah.  Huh, who knows...maybe we'll be Bible characters every year. 

And the most important part of the night...the boys had a blast and ate too much candy.  In fact Will is home sick today with an upset tummy.  Not sure if it's an actual stomach bug or sugar gut, but I'm not chancing sending him to school and puking in the middle of his classroom.  I've already been that mom this year and it's only the beginning of November.  We'll hunker down today and hope it passes. 

Our cute little Noah on his way to the party

The lion at the end of the night already looking pretty sick