The Braegger Family Blog: Halloween and such 2010

My youngest sister throws an awesome Halloween party every year and this is the creepy treat we brought: meringue bones. This is the recipe I used, but I thought I could grease the pan instead of use parchment paper as the recipe suggests. Note--parchment paper is NOT optional! (most of my meringue ended up just broken pieces and not the bones I originally piped out using a ziploc bag with the corner cut off)

My darling children

Joy and Jordan

their daughter Lily (I don't know why I don't have a picture of Sierra, but they had matching costumes)

Since I didn't wear a costume I got "punished" with this impromptu mummy getup

My brother, Eric, with his girlfriend, Ashley

My favorite costumes of Joy & Jordan's friends'--she had her ultrasound photo stuck to her stomach that you could see through the oven door and the number of days left to bake on the timer up top. The husband's apron says "bun maker"

A shot of Joy's kitchen with Jordan's brother Nate at the back

Lots of other people were there with their kids, but I don't know many of their friends, so I didn't get pictures of them :) For dinner they did a crepe bar and then a table of Halloween themed potluck items. The delicious fillings for the mummy wraps (crepes) had cute labels such as (Scooby Doo) van-illa pudding, BAT-nana pudding, O+ Oh, positive it's only strawberry sauce, hot cauldron o' fudge, etc.

Eric, who was Neo from the Matrix, even played the "pin the treasure chest on the pirate map" with the kids! It was lots of fun and the few of us who stayed late had a blast playing "Mafia" and watching an episode of "Supernatural."

I love that with Christian's coloring he gets such darling, rosy cheeks when it's chilly. (Wait, did I say coloring? I meant complete and utter lack of coloring :)

It started getting below freezing at night, so we thought we'd better salvage what we could that was left in our garden. We sure had fun with it!

The next three pictures are more of Buddy's photography handiwork:

(this one came out overexposed and with red eyes, but very cool for a witch)

On the 28th we went to a Halloween carnival at Faith's school.

I ran a game where the kids would try to toss a witch's hat onto a cone. It was lots of fun there were a ton of games (I think at least 15!). I loved how affordable it was--for $1 you could get a slice of pizza, a cookie, and a cup of water and the games were free! How they worked it is that every child got a wristband and each time they won a prize at a game they got an "X" on it. After three X's, they could still play the games, but they couldn't win any more prizes. Such a fun night!

On the 29th we had Ann & kids over to play and we made vampire suckers instead of the traditional ghosts. We just used some red tissue paper, black felt, silver twist ties, google eyes, and paper triangle fangs.

(Faith and Ella got fancy and added hair so theirs were vampiresses)

That night we had trunk-or-treating and homemade soup at the church.

On our way home, we passed by where a family sells the pumpkins they grow in their garden and noticed that they were clearancing out what was left for $2 each. We hadn't gotten any yet (with the exception of the puking pumpkin--see previous post below) so we got five big ones for ten bucks! We stayed up late scooping them out and making delicious toasted seeds.

Tony's maternal grandfather had passed away on the Sunday prior and we attended his funeral on the 30th. I need to get pictures from Tammy, so I'll do a separate post on that.

Halloween evening was pretty rainy. We got ready,

then waited for sunset. In the meantime we got this beautiful double rainbow!

It was kinda cold and we needed our umbrellas, but we trekked around our neighborhood and the nearby patio homes and the kids loaded up on candy.

We trick-or-treated at my mom & dad's and got full sized candy bars!

We stopped by their neighbor's to see their awesome display with tons of creepy manequins. How would you like to store those in your basement? I think I'll pass.

Christian wouldn't even turn his back on those scary guys for the picture above. He started crying because he wanted a picture, too, so I had him stand farther away and just quickly pivot toward me for this shot.