The Gooches: 3...2...1... Happy Halloween!

Wow! This Halloween was fun and I am so glad it is over. This year Tim and the boys decorated the house for Halloween while I was gone on my girls trip to KY back on September 15th, so needless to say Halloween has been a long time coming!

Because I watch kids for a living I decided this year to celebrate by doing a Halloween countdown. Which looked like this:

On each ghost was an activity/craft/treat we could do for the day. And on the big, black ghost was the activity of trick or treating! ALL of my ideas came from the best blog I think I have ever seen which I found through pintrest. www.littlefamilyfun.com is her website and I strive to be just like this mom and after doing this countdown I will definitely do more from her blog because the kids had so! much! fun!

Here are some crafts and activities that we did.

Pin the Face on Jack:

Chocolate Banana Ghosts:

Spider-Hand Cards:

Painting Pumpkins:

Besides painting the pumpkins we had a few other activities we did with the pumpkins. Like hide and seek pumpkins where I would hide all 7 pumpkins and then the kids would find them, and then I also did a scavenger hunt where on each pumpkin I taped a clue and I took them all around the house (inside and outside) until they found the prize at the end (which was our sugar cookies). Out of all that we did these were the most expensive, to buy seven I think I paid about 6$. But they were so worth it because after all the times we played hide and seek pumpkin and the other 2 activities as well, they were worth the money!!!

Bean Skeleton:

This activity was a hard one. The kids love to glue but only 1 was able to glue on the lines so basically none of the skeletons turned out and I had to take a picture of this one because Arlo decided to add a 'fat belly' that does not look like a fat belly. I was laughing so hard!!

Sugar Cookies:

Sugar Cookies were a 2 day event. The first day we made the cookie dough and frosting and then rolled and cut the dough and baked it. By the end, there was not on surface in my kitchen that was not covered in flour, but the kids loved it. The next day I had the scavenger hunt to find the cookies and when they were found we decorated them. By the way, here is the recipe to my cookies because they were the best sugar cookies I have ever made. They were not the best tasting (they were good, not great) but they were the fluffiest cookies and they held their shape perfectly! I will always use this recipe now!

Foam Jack o' Lanterns:

Here is the wall where we put up most of our art when we finished:

A few things on the wall that I have not mentioned yet are:

Dot pumpkins (I cut out pumpkins from construction paper and then they used bingo dotters to dot/pattern their pumpkins.

Dry Erase Jack o Lanterns (Once again I cut out pumpkins and put them in paper protectors, taped them up and gave them dry erase markers and tissues to color and erase... like magic!!!

Foam spooky Shapes (just like pumpkins but the stickers and shapes were all Halloween things)

Pumpkin Color Game (I cut out a pumpkin and glued different color dots on it. Then I put it in a paper protector. I cut out more of the color dots, taped them up (because I do not have a laminator) and put sticky tack on them. Then I made a little jack o lantern. I would hide the laminated color dots around the room then when it was your turn you throw the little jack o lantern on the pumpkin, which ever color it lands on, it the dot you have to go find and bring it back and put on the pumpkin. This game was super easy to make and my kids LOVED IT!!! I would even guess this was their favorite thing on the count down. We play it just about every day!

5 Little Pumpkin Song (I taught the kids this song with matching hand gestures and gave a copy to their parents. I had parents tell that their kids would not stop singing it!)

So that is it for my wall, a few other things that I had on ghosts that were for my boys only (which I differentiated by coloring the bottom of the ghost red) were: pumpkin patch, pumpkin carving, and trunk or treat.

Here are some pics of our pumpkin carving:

Here are the boys getting out the icky sticky guts!