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Happy Late Halloween

We were a little too busy celebrating Halloween and scraping paint off the mantel to wish you a Happy Halloween. We took the baby viking out for a spin. I couldn’t help but share the infant viking costume I made. It even had a felt axe to go with it:


Pacifiers keep him from pillaging the village. See, here is what happens when he doesn’t have one:

Marauding Baby! Run!

I made his baby viking costume, it was pretty easy just fake fur, felt, and leather string.

The rest of the evening we spent giving out candy to around 200 trick-or-treaters and hanging with our friends who helped pass it all out. Our new street was bumping!

As the evening wore on I thought to tell my friends that are getting ready to have babies, one of the best things about holidays is that you get to relive them all over again through your kids. This Halloween was just perfect for McClain’s first. I hope yours was just as nice!

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Fall Centerpiece Idea

I created some quick, cheap, and easy fall table decorations for my niece’s 1st birthday. Even though I “cuted” them up with bugs I reused them to make a nice, adult autumn decorations after the party. Here’s what you’ll need:

  • Various clear glass vases (Mine were just a few bucks from Goodwill and the Dollar Tree)
  • Fall leaves of assorted colors

Yep, that’s it! I went up to the local library with a bag and grabbed a bunch of red, yellow, and orange leaves off the ground. Then I used the still-green/yellow leaves off of my dying morning glory vine. Separate your pile of leaves into green, yellow, orange, and red. Then I started at the bottom. It is important to curves the leaves around the glass to let the colors show. I actually filled the center with yucky brown leaves from the yard to hold the next layer of leaves up. Then I just went from green to yellow to orange to red.

Just after I finished them

Amazingly they have mellowed nicely and still look good a week later.

Darker colors but still nice

The rest of the decorations I made just using various papers, printer, old school markers, and vegetable oil (rubbing a bit of that on the bugs made them translucent). It made nice, relatively cheap decorations and the crepe paper streamers and balloons just screamed “old-school birthday party”. The bug theme with beetles, caterpillars, butterflies, and dragonflies was chosen to be gender neutral so Mr. Mac could get in on the birthday fun. We celebrated his for the family that won’t actually see him on his 1st in November along with his cousin who turned 1 a couple of weeks back.

Do you have any quick and easy fall or birthday decorations? Please share.