Halloween 2011

I love Halloween. I love that Mark likes dressing up. I love that he’s up for theme dressing. I love that we have two children to dress up.

Mark has been asking for a couple months what we were going to do for Halloween. I think last year I saw something in one of my parenting magazines about making a dragon tail for a costume. It’s kind of been in my head since then.

So, that’s what we were: dragons.

I purchased some silver vinyl. I purchased some sheets of crafting foam. And I purchased some elastic.

Probably I didn’t need to buy the elastic. It didn’t really hold for any of us except little Emma.

I measured the tails out of the vinyl. Each tail was the length of our approximate height: Mark, 6’; me, 5’ 6”; Zachary, 3’; and Emma, 2’.

I measured the scales to match the ratio of our heights. So, each one of us had 16 scales down our tail. Each scale was the thickness of two foam sheets. Each scale was attached with hot glue.

Mark’s scales were green, mine were purple, Zachary’s were blue, and Emma’s were pink. We dressed in the corresponding color of shirt and gray pants.

As mentioned above, the elastic didn’t really work. Mark’s tail and my tail were too heavy to keep on our head with elastic. Zachary freaked out when I put the elastic under his chin. And the elastic kept pulling Emma’s ears forward.

So, Mark and I ended up with ribbon to firmly tie our tails to our heads. And I stapled (that’s right!) Zachary’s tail to his hat. He was happy to wear the tail then.

We first debuted our tails at the ward trunk or treat on Friday night. And Monday night, Halloween night, we walked the neighborhood that belongs to our ward.

Halloween night was actually the NICEST Halloween I can remember in ages. I mean, it was BEAUTIFUL. There was no breeze. There was hardly any chill. It was BEAUTIFUL. We had a great time. And we were glad to see our friends and show them our “dragons”!