I realize that we are a little late on this, but my philosophy is better late than never! Since we live in Swaziland, and the Swazi’s don’t celebrate Halloween we did not have a problem with pushing our Halloween date back a couple of weeks. On Halloween, Ben was in town at a meeting and both sisters were in the US. There are only a limited number of people we can ask to Trick or Treat with, and with the three of them being gone it took away about half of those options! So, we just went trick or treating last night.
Last year Mikayla was a princess and all year long she had talked about wanting to be Santa Clause for Halloween. At the beginning of October we asked her what she wanted to be again just to clarify and she suddenly switched to princess! I didn’t want to push the Santa thing because frankly I wasn’t very excited about making that costume. I also wasn’t very excited about her being a princess again so I subtly suggested that she be a wild thing from the book Where the Wild Things Are and that Max be Max King of the Wild Things. She immediately agreed and we got to work on brainstorming costume ideas.
Max was easy. He just needed a white outfit, a crown and a tail. Done! I also referenced this picture of Bella (read here to see the importance of Bella in our naming of Max) for inspiration.
Mikayla was a little bit trickier. She looked through the book and chose which wild thing she wanted to be. From there we started brainstorming ideas on how to make it happen. Of course we "brainstormed" up until the week of our trick or treating and did most of the costume work on Saturday and Sunday (we went trick or treating on Sunday)! Ha! Nothing like last minute preparations. To make her costume I cut out felt in the shape of fish scales and then roughly sewed them onto a pair of leggings. We attached a piece of fabric that looked like animal fur to the butt to look like a tail. Next we chose one of her striped dresses so she could be a mommy wild thing!
The hardest part was the head, but thanks to team work between Ben and I we were able to make it happen. We had a broken fan laying around the house so we took it apart and used one side of it for the face. We used paper mache to outline the face, leaving a large mouth opening for Mikayla to see through. Ben also attached some string so the face would sit nicely on her head. On Sunday morning I painted the face brown and attached eyes and nose made from felt. Ben made some horns from cardboard and those got glued on next. The final touch was adding yarn all around the edges for his hair. I think we did a pretty good job and she was very excited about it. The only unfortunate thing was that we spent all this time putting together her costume for 15 minutes of fun! Oh well, I think she really appreciated it and her mask is now hanging in her room!
She doesn’t look thrilled here, but trust me she was so giddy and excited. She just didn’t want to stop to take pictures, she wanted the candy! She did make sure to roar her terrible roar and show her terrible claws at each and every door.
Here she is showing off her tail. She wanted to make sure everyone knew that she had one.
Showing off her candy stash. This is one of the only pictures we got of her by herself. She was really not excited about pictures!
Max wanted a turn with the mask. I think it was a little big for him though…
Tags: Halloween
You are always so creative! Love the idea and how it worked out. Awesome!
[…] October we trick or treated in November. You can read all about the kids costumes and evening here. It was a fun night and I loved watching Mikayla share her candy with all her […]