We love Halloween! SPL and I always have a blast
with our tombstones, spider webs, and skeletons. This year was our first year in this new house so we had some challenges to figure out: most importantly, how to
(always a challenge but @ our old house we had some large river cobble that lined our front walkway that we always enlisted for extra support). This year we bought wooden stakes at the local hardware store. It worked pretty well.
Each year we add a couple of additions to our line up. This year it was a new skeleton, a giant spider and web, and some more skull lights. The skull lights went with our
and the skeleton was great -- SPL separated the different bones and distributed them in front of the different tombstones for a nice effect.Â
 the tough part was finding a place for the spider to spin her web. Our stucco exterior provided few places to anchor a web and yours truly is afraid of heights and isn't much for ladders so climbing up on the roof was out of the question. So we settled on our glass front door. I think the pièce de résistance was the sign SPL designed for our front gate (featured above): Come in if you DARE! He even did the dotted lines to represent blood. Awesome :-)
as his costume after much flip-flopping. At times he converted his ninja into an executioner (not sure where he got that idea). I think he was going for extra scary. His school had
on Halloween and
and parents participated. The class even had the patience to let us snap some
 I even borrowed SPL's pirate garb and face paint and joined in the fun!
We decided not to carve our pumpkin this year as we'd been told by the neighbors that the squirrels eat and distribute the pumpkin all over the yard :-/. So instead SPL
:
,
, and a
that we collaborated on. SPL even decided to
@ the library (a school tradition at this elementary).
For
, our friends from soccer invited us for a potluck dinner and t
in their neighborhood (which, it turns out, was just 5 blocks from our house! :-). All in all a very successful Halloween.