The Frugal (okay, Cheap) Parents Guide to Halloween

Today is Halloween. For as long as I can remember, I have waited all year long for this one day. I'm the person that starts decorating in September (a little bit at a time so Big Daddy doesn't notice). I was also the person that would go out and spend $75 each (or maybe a BIT more) on a Halloween costume for myself and my son.

Enter Big Daddy. I think we may have spent $75 total on costumes since we've been together. And that's for the whole family (including the ridiculously priced $25 glorified bat jammies for Nutt's first Halloween). This is not what I'm used to but I think we've made due pretty well. 

The year before last, I bought an old lacy nightie from the American Rescue Workers thrift store for $6 and wound up turning it into a really awesome witch costume for Tink (plus a $6.99 hat from Walmart). Evel found a bunch of random old costumes that he put together into some sort of demon dragon ballerina that was heading out for a fishing trip. That's Evel for you. 

But I've kind of realized that you can get away with spending less on Halloween (thanks to my parents and living with Big Daddy). Kids will make due with what they have (once they realize that resistance is futile). So here are some ideas that you can use to save yourself some money this Halloween, especially if you're like us and haven't bought costumes yet this year. Stay tuned below for the photo highlights of Halloweens past!

MUMMY

Probably the easiest of the cheap costumes to pull off. If you're like us and you're recovering from a flood, you will have 2 cases of toilet paper from the Red Cross sitting around (if not, go buy some). Wrap up your kids and viola! Instant mummification! By the end of the night, the TP should be partially unraveled and dirty and dragging about a half a mile behind your child, adding to the effect. This costume also subs as instant tissues if your kids noses are running from the brisk, Halloween air. We all know they're going to wipe their noses on their sleeves, anyway.

CHRISTMAS PRESENT

Get a box. Get some wrapping paper. Wrap the box in the wrapping paper, taking care to secure it well. Cut holes for the arms and head and a big hole in the bottom for the legs and to get your child in and out of the costume. Put them in the box and slap a big bow on their head. You now have a costume and hours of fun for your child's siblings as they push the kid in the box over and run away (just ask my sister). 

CAT

Buy a black turtleneck, black pants, black shoes and a black headband. Dress the kid in the black clothes and shoes. Draw black cat ears on a piece of flimsy cardboard (the front of a school notebook works well), taking care to make the little red insides of the ears. Cut them out and tape or glue them to the headband. Put the headband on your kid. Draw a cat face on your child, complete with a little red nose and whiskers. (You may also want to buy some rubbing alcohol to get the magic marker off of your child's face before school the next day).

HOBO

Raid Dad's closet for some clothes (look for lots of flannel and jeans that have been worn to hang drywall or work on a car). Dress the child in these clothes. DO NOT use a belt...you must use clothesline or rope to keep the pants up. Stuff a pillow inside the shirt to make a belly. Smear some dirt on your kid, mess up their hair and give them a candy cigar. You have a hobo. Bonus points if you add a flannel that is tied to the end of a stick like a carry-all or a flask in the front shirt pocket. 

GRAPES

Blow up a bunch of purple balloons. Get a purple hoodie and pants and dress your child in them. Pin the balloons to your child. Viola! A bunch of grapes. This costume will make it until your child tries to squeeze through the neighbors overgrown hedges. Bring the earplugs. 

OLD LADY

Get some of Granny's old clothes (mumu's, support stockings, orthopedic shoes, old glasses) and dress your child in them. Put their hair back in a bun and cover it with powder to give it the illusion of having grey hair. Put some bright red lipstick on them and you have an old lady. Bonus points if you can score a cane or walker. 

VAMPIRE

Dress your kid in their little, black 3-piece suit. Make a cape out of a black pillowcase (for a toddler) or a black sheet (for a bigger kid). Slick their hair down and make a noticable part on one side. Paint their face ghostly pale. Mix some red food coloring into corn syrup and paint it on your child's face so it looks like blood dripping from their mouth. Buy a set of plastic vampire teeth and you're set. Make sure you teach them to do the evil laugh (MUAHAHAHAHA!)

BEETLEJUICE

Start out with the vampire costume. Paint white stripes on the suit to make it look like Beetlejuice's suit from the movie. Instead of slicking the kid's hair down, spike it up and put some powder in it. Paint the face white but rub some dirt around the hairline. Stick a rubber snake in his pocket. 

So I hope that helps give you some inspiration for next Halloween. Without further ado, here's there reason you're all actually here...THE PICTURES!

Wow, what a picture to start with. Lizzie G in an outfit that was a bit too convincing.

Evel and his BFF playing dress up

Halloween 1985. These WERE the awesome costumes back then.

The witch costume that Nana S made for me. I wore it for three years until it didn't fit anymore.

Another Halloween 85 gem

Believe it or not, this is me (and Lizzie G in another questionable costume). My, my how times have changed...

Shitbrick being creepy

Halloween 2011 - Joe Dirt, a green monster thing and a vampire.

Halloween 2009 - The witch costume I made Tink and our weird skeleton goth old lady.

Halloween 2010 - The weird dragon ballerina, bat boy and the kitty cat.

He's the one that will be choosing our nursing homes

Nana S and Evel as a cowboy. Another quick homemade costume.

Our little Nittany Lion

It was a costume for Elvis's birthday but Satan didn't care

Not really a costume but it's a great opportunity to embarrass Evel.

Trid as a unicorn and Evel in the Teletubbie costume that my mom made him

This Is "Snot" What I Signed Up For!

When I was younger, I swore I would never have kids. I didn't want the responsibility or the accountability of what happens when they turn out like me. But I'm sure we all know things didn't go exactly as I planned.

Now I have 3 kids. Two boys and a girl. I love them to the moon and back...except when they get sick. If it were financially feasible to buy a bubble to keep them in until they were well, we would be adding on an addition to house it.

Nutt (the youngest) woke up this morning with the Niagra Falls of mucus leaking out of his face and mommy forgot her snot slicker. I didn't notice until I was trolling the aisles of Walmart in search of curtains and dryer sheets that I had a smear about the size of Iceland on my left shoulder. Thank god for cart sanitizing cloths that I used to wipe it off (and that someone had probably neglected to use when their kid sneezed their nasty germs all over the cart that my kid contracted this illness from). I have been praying all morning that me and my snot spot don't show up on the People of Walmart website.

It's not like this is my first rodeo but it's still disgusting. Thankfully, I've only been through one other since Tink was housebroken and had been trained on how to use a tissue by the time I met her. The problem is that the other rodeo was about the equivalent of something out of "8 Seconds."

Evel. He got the nickname for a reason. Even from birth everything this kid did was extreme. They told me he was going to be under 6 lbs at birth...he was 8 lbs even. They told me kids didn't walk until they were around 14 months...he was barely 9 months. They told me he had a slight dairy allergy and I witnessed this kid projectile vomit from his high chair to the other end of my 5 foot kitchen table.

I would have traded his "slight dairy allergy" for a snotty nose ANY DAY. I had to read the packaging on everything that we bought and decode the ingredient listing if I didn't want to be cleaning vomit off of every surface in my house. Any kind of dairy sent that kid into a fit that would rival the infamous pea soup scene in "The Excorcist." No milk, no cheese, no pizza. NOTHING.

So being the awesome mom that I am, I began my endeavor into soy foods. Soy milk, soy cheese, SOY CHOCOLATE. Everything that Evel ate, I ate. And now I completely understand why people that eat this way are so healthy.

If you've never eaten soy-based products in place of the normal stuff, please allow me to give you an example of the taste. Take a CD leaflet book, paint it yellow, put it between 2 slices of bread and eat it...you have soy cheese. Most of it was awful and I'm sure the reason that people on a soy diet are so skinny is because they themselves can barely stomach these imitation knockoffs. But the alternative was cleaning up vomit and having a VERY cranky child. I'll suffer quietly while sipping my soy milk infused coffee.

It went on like this until right before Evel was ready to start kindergarten. He stayed at Nana S's house for the weekend so I could have a much needed break before I got another much needed break when I finally shipped him off to school. I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic because I forgot to send his soy milk along. I could just picture my poor, old Nana's face when Old Faithful erupted from my child when he ate his Cookie Crisp and cow's milk in the morning. But then I got sleepy and eventually crashed out.

I wound up not getting up until around 9 AM and ran for the phone to call Nana, praying that Evel was still sleeping. When she answered, I all but screamed into the phone, "Don't give him milk!" I heard silence and then she said, "What? Who in the hell is this? If you're selling something, we don't want it." I finally got my wits about me and explained that I was not a telemarketer, but I was calling to make sure Evel didn't drink milk or she would have a very loooong morning. You know what this lady said to me?

"Really Jennifer? I told you all along that this allergy thing was just in your head. He ate a bowl of cereal an hour ago and he's fine. He's outside playing. I told him to just run for the woods if he felt sick. I don't want him puking in the yard because the cats will eat it." Gotta love Nana.

So just as quickly as Evel's dairy allergy had come on, it had vanished. After that, he could eat anything. We had pizza and McDonald's cheeseburgers and Red Rabbit milkshakes. We ate it ALL! We even had a good time feeding all of the crappy soy stuff to the stray cats that used to use our flowerbed as a litter box. They never came back.

All of this just to raise a child that would talk back to me and think that Big Daddy and I are walking ATM machine. I'm glad we're done having kids. Our luck, if we had another it would be allergic to keeping wine in the house.

Memory Collector or Hoarder?

Over the weekend Matt and I went to my Grandma Singer's house to get a bedroom set. Here's a bit of knowledge for those of you that don't know Grandma Singer.

One, I feel sorry for you that you didn't have the opportunity to meet her before she got sick. She was a great woman. Very strong and opinionated and she is the reason that I have the self-confidence that I do today.

Two, she has lived in her house for over 50 years. That's a long time.

In that 50 years, she has aquired stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. And a lot of that stuff is apparently mine. 

So Matt and I started loading up the bedroom set when Aunt Sissy starts dragging out the bags and boxes of treasures from years gone by. We wound up leaving with a bed, two dressers, a night stand and every childhood memory that my Nana hoarded in the 13 years that I lived with her (and quite a few of my sisters). I was kind of annoyed because I didn't really want the stuff. I'm not a "saver" of things like this. I tell my friends not to even bother buying a card because I'm not going to keep it and with the exception of a few really awesome art projects and little things that Tyler has made for me, I don't really save anything like that for my kids. I can't imagine Tyler caring about any of his kindergarten report cards so what's the point? I think the reason for this is because my Nana's house is PACKED full of things like this. So much that it has filled my Pappy's old room and my Aunt Sissy's old room (which is why she was insisting that I come and get my bedroom set, so she could take over the spare room). I like my space and I don't want it jammed full of things that I'm not going to use. 

Well last night after dinner, the kids and I sat down at the table and I started going through everything. We found little construction paper tooths with my name on them that my kindergarten teacher would stick on the closet door everytime one of us lost a tooth, my Little Brown Bear 1987 yearbook (which will make for some wonderful blackmail pictures once I get my scanner hooked up again) and a broken leg from one of my She-Ra horses that Nana found and kept just in case I still had the horse.

There was a pile of every single birthday card that I received on my first birthday and another stack of cards containing two dollar bills that my Great Aunt Elenor gave me every year for Easter, Christmas and my birthday. There was my collection of change purses (the purple hippo, the plastic heart and a few others) that I used every day to carry my lunch money and that have now been passed on to Ashley.

We found Barbie stickers, pretty rocks that I found on nature walks that I would take with Pappy Singer, my watch collection, a letter that I received from Smoky Bear (complete with my Junior Forest Ranger badge) and all the letters that I received from Mrs. Mettler (the elementary school principal when I attended) congratulating me on all of my great report cards. There we name tags, bus passes and birthday party invitations. Anything and everything that you can think of that a girl might accrue in her childhood was in there. And this is only the first box.

After going through all of this stuff that I thought was just junk, I had relived a good bit of my childhood. I couldn't believe that Nana kept ALL OF THIS STUFF and now I was left with the task of sorting through it and getting rid of it. 

I figured I would just pitch most of it but then there were the things that I found that I didn't want to lose, like my Nana Gram's (my Great Great Grandmother that passed when I was seven) obituary and the turn signal switch from the Escort that my dad was driving when he was hit by a drunk driver and almost killed. This stuff was pretty important so the sorting started.

After about an hour of going through everything, separating it into piles and giving away a few things to the 7 and 12 year-old vultures that were circling, I was ready to pitch a lot of the stuff. But then I started to see Nana sitting in her chair and looking at this stuff when I would bring it home. She would look over EVERYTHING and what I thought she got rid of, she had actually kept. How in the hell was I supposed to get rid of it now?

Through the clouds of guilt that were forming over me, an epiphany struck me. I have a computer, I have a scanner and I have piles of papers that I don't have room to keep. I can scan it onto a computer and get rid of it. Hell, I can even have it printed into a book so I can stroll down memory lane any time I like. I can even print one for Nana. Perfect!

So now I'm just waiting to get back into our house so I can start the scanning process and possibly get a book printed before Nana is too far gone to enjoy it. And thanks to my genious husband who suggested scanning the stacks and mounds of Ashley's artwork, we've freed up a significant portion of the area under her bed so we can use it to store other stuff she won't want in a few years. 

I look at my Nana's house that's filled with tons of stuff that she consider's treasures and I wonder if it might have looked different scanners would have been around back when I was a kid. Would she have the piles and bags and boxes of every paper that we ever gave her or would she have a neat little collection of books to document everything great that we ever accomplished? I don't know. But I do know that I can now save all of the memories that she thought were important and get rid of the clutter (with the exception of one turn signal switch).

One of my dreams has always been to write a book of memoirs. It turns out Nana Singer had been writing the first chapter for me all along.