This Halloween, I seriously went a little crazy. Because it was a Monday and Mondays always make me feel like I can conquer the world and do it all, I decided to paint the front door. You have to understand, I live in Arizona in a neighborhood full of “cookie-cutter” stucco houses that are supposed to “blend in with the environment” that environment basically is a variation on taupe… which in my book is a little boring. Someday, I hope to live somewhere that has cape-cod style houses with wrap-around porches and big lush green growing things everywhere. But as it is, I am subjected to the HOA who has bi-laws about what your front exterior looks like. So I did the most daring thing I figured I could do and that was to paint the front door in Benjamin Moore’s Toasted Chestnut which in the store and indoors looked a little too crazy and dark, but in the totally saturated light of Arizona it looks fabulous!
Before After
The first photo is what my front door looked like that morning and the second photo is after I fished replacing the hardware before I picked up my son from school that same afternoon.
When I got my son home from school that Afternoon the kids and I got to work making Halloween-Themed food so that they would at least have something that wasn’t candy before I took them out trick-or-treating. We made goblin flatbreads an idea from Martha Stewart’s website, as well as Mummy Dogs that I painted faces on with edible markers. Here is the pan that I took a photo of and sent from my camera to show my husband the fun he was missing (I was trying to encourage him to get home soon so we could go trick-or-treating and he could man the door). One of the flat-breads didn’t fit on the other try so we stuck it on the edge of this pan.
We served the flat-bread with marinara sauce and the hotdogs with ketchup; both of which made these snacks seem extra gory! The kids enjoyed them though. Here are photos of my 5-year-old boy and 18-month girl enjoying their snacks.
After our snack, I had them dress in their costumes and try to take photos in the ever-darkening night…part of the reason these didn’t turn out like I hoped (the other reason was that the kids were so excited they pretty much wouldn’t hold still.
Yes, I made my girl’s costume and no, I didn’t even think about the fact that every other girl in the whole neighborhood was going to be dressed up like Tangled. This is just my little girl as a damsel in distress and my gallant little boy who wanted to be a knight in shining armor (again). I didn’t make him a new costume though I probably should have looked at it on him to make sure he hadn’t outgrown it before Halloween…. he wears it all the time to play pretend in, but I didn’t notice how little it was getting on him until I actually took the pictures.
Here is his favorite “tough guy” stance….too funny!
Here’s my newly painted door complete with a wreath that night.
Here are the cute pumpkins my husband was so sweet and carved for us (I get way too nervous with knives to attempt this). The jack-o-lantern face was designed by my son who even wrote out cute step-by-step instructions for my husband to follow in order to get the desired results. The spider was from one of those kits you get from the grocery store (it did lose one of legs but my ingenious husband figured out he could re-attach it using a straight-pin).
I hope you all had a Happy Halloween!
