Halloween Recap

We had such a busy Halloween "season," I guess you could say, but it was so much fun I have to attempt to chronicle all of it. This was the first year we did not dress up as a family "theme" (past years' themes included Peter Pan, Goldilocks and the Three bears, princesses and a frog prince, the circus, bugs, etc.) Last year I decided it would be our last year, since it was so hard to coordinate everyone, and the kids were starting to get old enough to have their own opinions anyway about what they wanted to be. This year they all went as their favorite characters. Troy: Thomas the Train, Brooklyn: Hello Kitty, and Kate: okay I'm not totally sure about this one. She was "Barbie from a Fashion Fairy Tale" or something like that... she showed me the preview for a Barbie movie and said THAT was what she wanted to be for Halloween. It was just a flash of Barbies in dresses walking down a fashion show runway. I didn't catch a glimpse of anything concrete. So... I just found some fabric in Barbie-type colors (I tried to think about what you might see a Barbie doll wearing. Pink, purple, and silver? Yes.) and then I made up a little dress. Kate's reaction, "Um... that's not quite what I had in mind." Me: "But you LIKE IT!" Spray her with glitter and curl her hair, and she's good to go.

Poor Troy and his costume. He loved it, but actually walking around in it? Not so much. I'm afraid the costume didn't survive either night he wore it. On Halloween he ended up trick-or-treating in his Thomas t-shirt while Travis carried the costume. I made him do that because I painstakingly painted that stack of cardboard boxes, darn it! That costume was coming with us one way or another.

For the ward trunk-or-treat, I went as a pregnant housewife (but yes I did dress up even though I know that's what I actually am). My real "costume" was Travis. Let's just say we were the biggest scandal at the church...

We are all freakishly short people.
Kidding (well, not really), but the guy behind us is actually on stilts.
No seriously.

On Real Halloween, we were just heading out the door - in fact I went downstairs to look for some heavier coats for the kids, when I waded right into a puddle. Yes, the basement had flooded that day, and the carpet was soaked. Some connection to the water supply line had leaked for some reason and was dripping a steady stream of water onto the floor. The geniuses who laid the foundation had, of course, placed the water drain at the highest point of the floor, so the water had seeped under the stairs as well. It was awesome. We called our landlord and made him come and interrupt his Halloween night to save the day. I have already imposed a much larger Halloween favor on him recently - more about that later.

Anyway, we barely made it around the block trick-or-treating with friends (and by "we" I mean myself and Brooklyn, whose quest for candy is unstoppable. Troy went home with Travis when he - the former - had to go potty, and Kate was tired so she joined them). But OH MY GOODNESS they got a lot of candy! And unfortunately I had oversupplied our own house with candy because I was scared of running out (okay fine, because I wanted to eat it myself... all month long.) So we are still recovering from the sugar hangover that was the aftermath of Halloween.

Also this past week: I co-chaired Kate's class Halloween party, and we played an awesome candy-corn-tossing game that I'm sure her teacher loved me for (archaeologists will be excavating petrified candy corn out of that classroom carpet for centuries to come).

Kate's dance class had a Halloween party in which families were invited to come and watch a few dances they had prepared.

And Troy hosted his play group at our house on Halloween, and we made orange sugar cookies.

And last but not least, our Halloween party. But first, a little history. I love Agatha Christie. I mean, she is on my list of top 10 people I can't wait to meet in heaven. Right up there alongside Ernest Shackleton and Johannes Brahms. I spend every summer reading her books as fast as I can get through them. I just love murder. (I mean, you know, the psychology of murder, preferably fictitious. I don't actually love anything about real people being killed by other people.) So a couple years ago we started a tradition of hosting a murder mystery dinner in October, and I would write the script. Okay, it was supposed to be an annual thing, but last year we did not manage to make it happen. The first murder mystery, though, was awesome. It involved a 1920s speakeasy, an undercover British detective masquerading as an American civilian, a wounded war veteran, and me convincing one of my piano students' dad to put on a costume and lie in his driveway like a dead body and let me photograph him.

Here are a few gems from that evening: (And yes, that mustache in the picture below is genuine, grown expressly for this party) - October 2011 -

So for this year's party, I was trying to think of some great ideas when Travis suggested we have an outdoor party at Andy's farm. (Andy is our landlord - a friend of ours who we're renting from - and he recently bought a farm.) I thought that was a stupendous idea, so we asked him and began to make plans. My idea for a theme was the California gold rush - mostly inspired because I wanted to have an on-site murder (the last party was solving a murder that had occurred the night before), and Andy kept talking about having explosives. So I was thinking, mine explosion...? Anyway, it turned out that construction on the highway leading to the entrance to the farm made the road completely impassable, and anyway the weather was turning colder and I was nervous about an outdoor dinner in the cold. So the farm idea was scrapped. But Andy had been working with his brother and a friend on renovating a house they had bought - which happens to be certifiably the oldest house in Kansas City, built in the 1820s and still standing! It was in pretty dilapidated condition, and definitely currently under construction, but when they said we could use it for our murder, I jumped at the chance!

These oak trees are 13 feet around, by the way!

I chose 1875 Missouri for our theme. All I needed was a victim. (I told you I'd asked a huge Halloween-related favor of Andy recently...) We had eight dinner guests total in attendance, and Andy, who was George Vernon, the wealthy ranching businessman and heir to a massive estate, arrived to check in with his sister's dinner party. He had proposed a scavenger hunt for us, so we all scattered around the property searching for various little clues. My plan was for the murderer to fire a shot that would bring us all running, from my trusty cap gun, but Andy was convinced it wouldn't be loud enough, and remember he's obsessed with explosives. So he used an M-80 instead to, um, approximate the sound of a rifle shot. I don't know about the other guests, who unlike me weren't expecting anything, but I nearly had a heart attack. And when I saw Andy lying dead on the lawn, my heart was pounding for a solid 20 minutes. It was a pretty spectacular effect! Unfortunately the entire nearby neighborhood was as shell-shocked as I was. As we stood there on the lawn around the body sprawled out on the grass, one guy called over the fence wanting to know whether we were all okay. We were like, "Yeah... and also we always dress like this." Ha! He must have just thought we were crazy because he didn't seem to believe us and wouldn't leave. We had to get our victim to reassure him by miraculously resurrecting himself and calling back that everything was fine. (Then just before Andy left he muttered to us that if the police showed up, we knew nothing.) I REALLY wish I had pictures of any of this, but like I said, I was in shock.

We retired into the house, the main sitting room of which Travis had painstakingly swept and cleaned of construction rubble earlier that afternoon. (All the same, I'm pretty sure we are all soon going to die of either lead poisoning or asbestos!) We solved our murder over dinner, and needless to say, it was Louise.