The Lee Family: Trick Or Treat!

It is finally Halloween! I absolutely love Halloween since it's so much fun to talk about costume options for each of the girls, I am able to be a little creative with their costumes and it's just a fun night out together. Growing up I wasn't able to trick-or-treat until middle school since the town I grew up in didn't allow trick-or-treating after a child was hit by a car and killed. Instead, our elementary school would hold a festival in the gym and we'd play festival games and get a little candy. It wasn't until I went to a middle school in another town that I was able to trick-or-treat with my friends in their neighborhood.

Of course the girls really love collecting candy, but I think they also love to dress up and look different for an evening. This year I asked the girls about a month before Halloween and Sofia immediately knew she wanted to be an astronaut. Originally Olivia wanted to to be a fairy, but I suggested she dress up as a unicorn and she agreed. I wanted her to wear her unicorn horn from her birthday and had a few easy ideas about creating a costume. Thanks to Pinterest there are a ton of great ideas and she really loved sitting with me and looking at different costume and unicorn face painting ideas. I ordered a white long-sleeved and skirted leotard and tights for Olivia's unicorn costume and used yarn that was a combined pink and purple color to make her tail and "hooves" for her hands. We planned to spray paint her black boots gold, but she decided to use her gold tennis shoes instead. She was most excited to have her face painted as a unicorn, which we'd seen on Pinterest.

For Sofia I knew we had to buy an astronaut costume and then decided to create some of the extras. We spray painted her Target cowboy boots silver and I used three 2-liter soda bottles to make "oxygen tanks" that were also spray painted silver and glued together. I used black ribbon to create shoulder straps that we ended up safety pinning to her costume. A few days before, Sofia and I made a paper mache NASA helmet using a balloon, strips of printer paper and a mixture of wood glue and water. We got into a good groove with me painting the strips with the watered-down wood glue and hand it to Sofia to place it onto the balloon. We ended up adding probably 3 or 4 layers of paper strips and were really surprised by hard solid the helmet was once it dried! I thought the helmet would have "NASA" on each side but CK and Sofia corrected me that the only markings on the real helmets are a wide red commander stripe down the center. So, I painted one on which was easy and then used electrical tape to smooth out the openings. It ended up looking pretty cute and worked well and Sofia loved it!

On Halloween day it was forecast to be in the mid-50s and raining! It seemed like the rain would hold off, until it started raining lightly around 1:30pm. It rained steadily but stopped around 5pm, which was perfect! We ate white chicken chili and corn bread and then the girls got dressed into their costumes. Sofia was lucky in that she could wear whatever she wanted under her astronaut costume, so she wore leggings and a long-sleeved shirt and was completely comfortable all evening. Olivia, on the other hand, had a very thin costume, so I had her wear a pair of white leggings under her white tights and we found a white fuzzy vest that was Sofia's that worked perfectly with her costume! I did her face paint while looking at the Pinterest post and it turned out really cute. She loved it! I took them outside to take a few photos before the festivities, and Olivia was cold from the beginning!

We met up with Stacy, Marco, Antonio, and Luca. Brandon didn't dress up this Halloween, now that he's 14 years old, but he walked the neighborhood with us. The kids actually trick-or-treated at our house first and Connie passed out candy to the eager crew. We then stopped by Pete's house and got more delicious candy. We continued down the neighborhood and saw Carla and Mitzi and ended up connecting with Peter and Tammy and their two girls, as well as Irena, Waguih and their sweet little girl, Michelle. We finished up the rest of the neighborhood and then caravanned to Shivani's neighborhood. Pritha invited us to come to their neighborhood pizza party and costume contest at 5pm, but we really wanted to go through our neighborhood first, so we made it over around 6:30pm. Before we headed over, we had to empty both of the girl's candy containers because they were both very full from all of our generous neighbors! It was crisp and cool, but both girls were very comfortable. Olivia did end up getting cold after we'd started trick-or-treating in Shivani's neighborhood. I also wore a white vest, so I gave it to Olivia which looked like a big, fluffy dress on her. She'd warm up quickly and then she would give it back to me. We visited the rest of Shivani's street and the girls were mesmerized by the house that had a scene of dancing skeletons which then turned into a scene of skeletons climbing out of the ground. It was super creepy, but the girls couldn't stop watching it.

On the next block there was another house that included a full haunted house in the front yard. The kids loved it, especially when the spiders would drop down on them. Just after that house, right around 7pm, Olivia announced she was done and wanted to go home. She said she wasn't cold, I think she was just tired. She and I walked back with Pritha and Shivani to their house where CK and Balaji were hanging out and "passing out candy." Connie stayed with Sofia and Antonio and crew, who continued down the street trick-or-treating. Once we were back at Pritha's house, Olivia tried out some of her candy and sat on my lap. Sofia and Connie returned about 45 minutes later and we said our goodbyes and headed home. Both girls had a great time but they were exhausted.

Once we were home, the girls looked over their candy collection and then changed out of their costumes and went to bed. Olivia loves having her Grandma in town to put her to bed. It's a nice break for me too.

Sofia working on her NASA helmet