Halloween Countdown Day 29: All Through the House, All Through My Head...

The day is almost here folks... Halloween is the day after tomorrow. This fall has been a... leafy one to put it mildly:

And the colors (when it wasn't raining) have been beautiful. Crunchy leaves on the ground, covering the lawn. It will be time to collect all the toys off the lawn soon and stow them in the garage for the winter. Sigh. 

Right now, the trees still retain some of their beauty, with fiery oranges and golds overhead. 

The views around here are amazing. They make for stunning late-afternoon walks. 

Until ZOMBIES ATTACK!!!

Halloween season seems to rekindle my daughter's interest in special effects make-up every fall. It usually doesn't last very long after that... 

But... while she's hitting it... she's hitting it. 

She attempted some new stuff this year. With results she had mixed feelings about. 

I was pretty amazed by some of the results she achieved. She does most of this with toilet paper, vaseline, fake blood, and her usual cosmetics. 

This was a particular favorite. I take a lot of pride in m daughter, not because of her morbid interests... but because she's so GOOD at sharing her morbid interests. I want her to be passionate about something. She seems to really enjoy herself when she does this stuff.

We dressed up the house too. 

My wife bought rust-colored mums for the porch. The porch we had to rip apart and have rebuilt this past week, so I'm glad I got a few pictures while we could. Not having the porch to decorate properly felt like it stole some of our Halloween away.

Here's old Skully in the window of our front door. Love this guy. Soon it will be time to pull him back into the cave where he lives the other 11 months of the year. But he'll get to look out the window on the BIG NIGHT at the very least.

Here's our "Thriller" skeleton. Thriller has become my youngest son's favorite Halloween song this year. He has a speech impediment so he sings it "Cud-did-did Driller! Driller Nigh!" Which I find endlessly entertaining, even after the 20th or so time we've heard the song this season. 

More window dressings. My vintage Halloween cat cut-out is still a favorite Goodwill find. 

The bookshelves in the dining room get the most treatment inside the house (besides the shelves in my cave) with a few different little themes going on for some of the shelves: the haunted apothecary, the Halloween Cemetery/Village, the multi-colored pumpkins, etc. 

Because we moved the hutch out of the dining room area for more space, we now decorate the picture window in there instead. All kinds of fun stuff there. 

And we dressed up the chandelier in autumn leaves this season as well. These will probably stay up until the christmas decorations go up, although the skeletons, bats, eyeballs, and the like will all come down after Halloween. 

Here's a look from a different angle. 

There's more stuff like these lanterns all over the house, but I won't bore you with every last detail. That skull lantern is a favorite of mine though. 

There's even a pint-sized Dracula creeping in the trees out front by the mailbox. 

And this guy, hanging out above it all like he knows something we don't... and maybe he does?

Here's an autumn-themed cupcake-cake that my wife made for a friend's daughter. There are a bunch of cupcakes under that frosting, and the owls are cake-pops. She stresses out SO MUCH over every cake, but I love the way this one came out. 

Speaking of treats, my boys are still munching on the apples we picked from our trip out to the Treworgy Orchards and Corn Maze.

The also carved their jack-o'-lanterns. My youngest here got a lot of help from mom with the design.

My older son designed this guy all on his own, I did the cutting for him, and he helped poke out all of the pieces. 

HEre the are together, sitting next to a bowl full of pumpkin guts (which makes my older son gag to scoop out, so he does a couple of scoops and then hands the spoon over to me... slacker.)

And here they are, lit up in the night. A couple of fiery freaks!

Speaking of guts, here are the seeds, nicely toasted and ready to snack on.

We also did a lot at the library this season, with my wife volunteering to do some story-times. This was one of the crafts she had the kids do, a tissue-paper "stained-glas" pumpkin.

Here I am at the library, reading Here They Come! by David Costello, one of my absolute favorite Halloween books to read to my kids. 

Another craft they did were these leaf-collection wreaths.

And these masks for playing dress-up!

Spooky!

There was some commercialism mixed in with our homemade Halloween, oh believe me. I drank WAY more pumpkin-mocha coffee from Dunkin Donuts, and the chocolate-frosted pumpkin doughnuts were INSANELY good considering I don't usually care for their doughnuts.

My wife found this ridiculously hilarious. I found it kind of sad.

But my sadness soon burned off when I tried on this wig and glasses ensemble at Target! 

I found a rockin' wig for my wife.

Eye see you! 

NOT a look that works for my wife...

And our young son, Malachi. He says he wants me to come and Walk Behind the Rows for a moment... I'll be right back... 

Even Groot got in on the action! Here he is growing himself a Halloween costume.

And a birthday present from myself to myself consisted of these two Halloween icons. How I adore Funko. 

So, too soon the Tricking and Treating will be done with, and all of these orange and black decorations will go back to sleep in all the attics (or just get moved back into my cave for now) around the world... and the stores will dress for Christmas and we will forget the impish fun that Halloween gives us every year... until next October (who am I kidding? Next September.)

That's all I've got for tonight kiddos! We'll see what I can scrape together for tomorrow night, and then at some point I'll be back with more Gremlinesque Goodwill Goodies. Until then... Happy Haunting!