Now, before all the tiredness and being a disappointment to everyone kicked in, there was some excitement for Halloween.

Halloween prep started back in August when I found a box of free costumes on Facebook Marketplace. I drove up to a spiffy mansion where the box of costumes awaited me, and I slipped a crumpled, possibly ripped, dollar bill under the porch flower pot as a generous tip.

Come September, Halloween really started to come front center in my thoughts. It’s a recurring disease my family has. Usually we start to plan our individual costumes back in February / March time. This year I was ridiculously BEHIND SCHEDULE. Plus, the older my children get, the more I panic over matching family costumes. This year might be the year when my children realize they have way more independence than I allow them, and may mutiny against my attempts for adorable Halloween portraits.

I tried to get the place all spooked up without actually being spooky because we have small children and also because Taylor and I are milksops. Every year I plan to watch a scary movie, but then Taylor and I get jumpy just listening to the Supernatural podcast so maybe we’ll save Pooh’s Heffalump Halloween for next year.

To be clear, Taylor isn’t easily spooked. He hates haunted houses because he feels constantly on the defense, fists raised to defend his home/wife/country, etc. And then he’s mad that his idiot wife dragged him into this against his will. AGAIN.

I, for one, am shooketh by anything remotely fake creepy. In IRL scary situations, I am calm and collected. Seriously. I have been STOOD UP AT A BANK. MULTIPLE TIMES. And I came out fine. But something about a staged spooky situation spirals me into relentless anxiety, keeping me up at night plotting escape routes for when a psychokiller inevitably enters our home to kill us all. This anxiety also keeps Taylor up at night, constantly comforting his deranged and weeping wife.

Anyway, this post spiraled. What I wanted to post was our cute pumpkins:

Who picked cute pumpkins with their Papa for the doorstep.

Which eventually became compost.

We even went out for a drive to take in awesome Halloween decorations. This was my favorite:

Skeletons modeling human interactions are hilarious to me.

Coveting everyone’s fun halloween decor sent me on a thrifting spree at Savers, where I found this cute little things for a couple bucks each.

There’s an unused spider web in the decorations tub that I might get around to pulling out and sweet talking the neighbor kids to decorating for me 🙂