A couple of weeks ago a strange man at the train station offered my kids packages of Starburst candy.
I’m sure the man was just trying to be nice and the candy was unopened, but still. In context, it was an uncomfortable situation.
It was one of those lessons in “we don’t take candy from strangers.”
Except on Halloween, right mom?
GAH!
My kids are wild about Halloween. They’ve been planning their costumes for months. And they really, really, really like it when we decorate the house for Halloween.
Just because one year I went a little crazy with Halloween book covers and such and now they think we should decorate every year. Ha! That’ll teach me.
Halloween is celebrated in Ireland, but it’s not as big commercially as it is in the United States. There’s not an entire aisle at the grocery store, for instance, devoted to Halloween candy. There’s an end cap with two different variety boxes of candy.
Anyway, I wasn’t quite in the mood to decorate the house this year, but their little faces were so cute when they said, “please mama.” GAH!
So I decided to see what I could come up with that required no money and not a lot of effort. I mom so hard some days.
I printed off a bat outline I found on the internet, traced it onto a bunch of black card stock I had in my stash and then started cutting. Trace, cut, repeat.
The bats are simply taped to the wall.
If you bend the wings on the paper bats slightly it gives a nice 3-D effect. Fancy.
This mantel and stove are located immediately left of the problem wall in our living room that I wrote about recently. It’s the mantel I’ve been ignoring, so it was an empty canvas for some Halloween fun.
We don’t intend on using this little wood stove. We don’t even have firewood, but I guess we’ll see how the winter goes. Be open to the possibilities and all that not freezing business jazz.
One of my horseshoe pumpkins is holding court on the hearth. It’s still one of my most favorite DIY projects.
While I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with this space after October 31, I do like the brick on this wood stove surround.
That’s something, right?
Back to the easiest craft ever. I decided to go for the whimsical look with the BOO lettering.
That’s code for I didn’t want to bother with printing out a template, so I just freehanded the letters. I craft so hard some days.
All sarcasm aside, my kids were so happy to come home from school and find that bats had taken over our house. It almost makes up for the fact that we do not have blowup Halloween characters in our yard. But I have been letting the spiders do their thing on the front porch and by Halloween I’m thinking it’s going to look nice and festive.
If you liked this post, here are some others you might enjoy as well. If you didn’t enjoy this post, aw nuts.
That Time I Was SURE I was Going to See an Unicorn