Month: August 2022

Is It Too Early for Halloween? đź‘»

We love Halloween! Seriously, in our house Christmas may last a little longer, but there is nothing like the feeling of an approaching Halloween for us. Once October 1st rolls around we are ready to go and we have to hold ourselves down until the 15th (completely arbitrary date, incidentally) to start decorating, which we do fairly low-key for all our love of the holiday. We’ll put up a dark wreath on the front door, witches will fly outside our front window, slightly spooky lanterns suddenly pop up in the living room and sometimes even in the bathroom (what is a bath if not a more pleasant smelling witch’s brew, really…), and our black cat is suddenly not just a pet but also a lovely real-life Halloween decoration.

Our Ichabod: suitably named for Halloween, he is our year-round interactive spooky beast.

And so, as the end of August and the start of September approach, it is time to start planning for our annual Halloween party. (This might be a good time to tell you that I’m not necessarily known for doing things at the appropriate time always, while we’re on the subject. For example: I will happily watch Christmas movies in May – seriously: not a problem for me. At all.)

The party itself is not a massive shindig, if I’m honest. It’s not a full-on come-to-our-haunted-house-in-full-fancy-dress type thing: it’s really more of a chance for the English speaking kids that our kids have befriended over the years to get together, catch up, and do some light Halloween celebrating, Anglo-American style.

I do always look forward to it very much: it’s fun to see them all every year, another year older, some of them having gone off in different directions as they’ve gone on to different schools. The Halloween party is a chance to reconnect for them and us. It’s also quite a challenge to organize so I begin thinking about it already around this time of year with anticipatory glee. Since I’m in the Halloween-planning mood already, and you can never begin too early, for this blog post I thought I’d share some ideas for family-friendly Halloween get-togethers. Here goes.

Halloween Quiz Lots of people love celebrating Halloween, but how many know its origins, or its equivalents around the world with their accompanying traditions? There are dozens of fun factoids you can pour into this quiz. All you really need to do is read up on this holiday, maybe branch out a little into witches, ghouls and superstitions, and before you know it you’ll have a ton of questions to choose from. Of course, there are also a bunch of ready made quizzes available online; I just prefer to make them myself because, well: control freak, nerd, show-off – take your pick!

If there are younger kids at the party, do take care to keep the questions and answers accessible to all – or make some questions that are better answerable for the older kids, and some for the younger ones, then team up older and younger kids to give them even chances. Surprisingly, I found that some of the “younger” questions were actually quite challenging for the older kids as well.

Halloween Mad Libs It’s mad libs, Halloween style! There are plenty of mad libs templates you can find online for this, but if you’re feeling creative, you can come up with your own stories as well.

Halloween Creations There are a bunch of games that will allow kids to be creative and really run with their own ideas. It’s great fun to see what they come up with! Here are some options:

Witch’s Brew: have everyone come up with their own witch’s brew – what’s in it, how would it taste, what would it do, what spell goes with it?

Draw What You Hear: play some Halloween songs or haunting melodies and have the kids draw something that’s described in the song or how it makes them feel. Some good songs for this are Monster Mash by Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt Keepers, and Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley, or for more abstract pictures Erutan’s Transylvanian Lullaby, and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre.

If I Made a Movie: Have them think up a movie title for a Halloween movie they would, and have them explain what the story would be.

Or just play a game of Once Upon a Time… Give a (spooky) story prompt, then hand the tale off to the next person to add their few lines, then to the next person, and so on…

Who Are You? For this game, you ask everyone to answer 6 questions about themselves – questions like: favorite scary monster? favorite Halloween candy? etc – then collect the sheets. Without revealing the names, you read out the answers on each sheet and see if the others can guess whose sheet it is.

Fun food You can dress up a lot of easily made drinks and snacks as something else. Pink lemonade? Unicorn wee. Snack sausages? Severed fingers (just slice a little sliver off the top and tear the other end off, then leak some tomato ketchup out of the torn end). Lasagne: entrails and sinew with a layer of grilled ectoplasm (who knew you could grill that stuff?!) Cola? Witch’s brew: just pour it over into a lightly more ornate bottle and stick on a homemade label. Be sure to list the ingredients, like snail slime, eye of newt, you know – the usual.

If you have the time and you feel so inclined, you could of course also decide on some Halloween themed snacks of your own creation, such as cupcakes decorated with flying bats made out of fondant, monster shaped cookies, or mummified sausages (sausages wrapped in ribbons of puff pastry).

Home-made Halloween and fall themed gingerbread cookies.

One time, I actually made something that looked almost too disgusting to eat: I had carved a nauseated face in a pumpkin, and then put some risotto con fungi in a heap in front of it and some in the pumpkin’s mouth. It took a while before I could get anyone in the house to eat risotto again…

Of course, standard fall treats are always fun: roasting marshmallows over a fire, making smores, serving pumpkin spiced lattes and hot cider. To make them more Halloween-y, you can do these wearing a witch’s hat or a vampire cape, and possibly playing some eerie music in the background.

Gift bags or baskets We put together a little something for the guests to take home afterwards to extend the fun a little longer. I usually make a Halloween crossword, a word search, or a word scramble to put in the bag, with a cute pen or pencil. I’ll add a small bag of candy, or even a homemade decorated cupcake, and a spooky thank you card.

One year, when I was feeling particularly inspired, I even spent quite a bit of time making stuffed Halloween monsters out of old socks and scarves. I placed them together in a big basket with a sign in front of it saying “Adopt a Monster”. (They all got adopted, even though they looked fairly awful and amateurish. I am NOT good at sewing. It’s the thought that counts, I guess.)

Honestly, I could probably keep listing and coming up with Halloween party suggestions, but seeing as how it’s still only August, I think I’ll leave it at this for now. Knowing myself, I’ll be writing a few more blog posts to do with Halloween in one way or another between now and 31 October. So if you love the season like I do, check back for more over the coming few weeks.

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Stick to It

Featured photo by Renáta-Adrienn on Unsplash

Today school starts again for my youngest, and tomorrow the oldest also begins the new academic year. The youngest does not want to go. The oldest is actually kind of looking forward to it.

When I ask the youngest why he doesn’t like school, his answers are both true and hilarious: “It takes all day!” and “You have to work all the time!” (He’s really not going to like adulting.) When I ask the oldest what they like about school, it’s mostly the artistic and creative subjects and extracurriculars, and there are many of those – it’s one of the main reasons we chose this school.

But while my children have opposite feelings about being in school, what they have in common – and in common with us as well – is that the academic year brings both order and chaos for them. So yesterday we decided to try something that is new (well, to be fair, not actually new at all – we have tried this before, but this time FEELS different and therefore new) for us as a family: we made. A. Schedule.

That’s right: the household with three ADHD people and one seriously outnumbered neuronormative guy (who doesn’t really like schedules that much either) came up with a schedule.

Freedom in discipline, we hope.

The main goals for us are to not be driven nuts by either our activities, each other, or ourselves. Of course, for us to find out whether we’ve actually made a good schedule this time we have to do the most challenging thing of all, and where all previous attempts at organizing and structuring our household have failed. We have to … wait for it … *whispers* stick to it.

As I confessed earlier, we have tried to organize and streamline things many, many times before in this house, but for some reason making the plan and then sticking to it has proved unbelievably difficult for many different reason: unexpected events, low energy levels, hyperfocus, no focus, emotional responses to not quite being on schedule resulting in veering even more off schedule (it’s an ADHD thing, I’ve been told). You know: reasons.

But we keep trying. We spent a fair amount of time for this latest attempt making sure that the goals we’ve set ourselves are actually feasible, and that there is room for the unexpected. We’ve also built in repetition, and regularity for the things we want, not just for the things we need.

I think that might be where we’ve gone wrong in the past: we placed the emphasis only on the things that were needed, not on the things that make us feel good, happy, and creative. That’s different this time around – we made this schedule to meet our own needs as well as others’.

There will still be challenges, of course, but we also have one more thing that we didn’t have before and that is a better understanding of at least three out of four brains in our family (the ADHD ones). It means we can take each other and ourselves into account more, and that in turn means both more realistic plans and more reasonable expectations.

The academic year has just started so I have no idea how well or even if this time we’ve found the winning formula, but with everything we’ve learned the past year, and a new approach based on kindness and fulfillment as well as goals and achievements, I feel like this time we have a good chance at success.