family

Halloween 2013

For Halloween this year, we decided to fly off to Neverland!

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Halloween 2013 was quite a last-minute affair. While trying to get Miss L to narrow down her options, we were constantly facing new ones at every turn. Minnie Mouse. Izzy from Jake & the Neverland Pirates. Cinderella (yup… again.) Yet, on one fateful afternoon phone call, when Miss L was given the choice of wearing my old Tinker Bell costume by Grandma L, she gleefully accepted the offer. Funny part is that while Grandma L had saved the costume (which Great Grandma A had made for me!), she had forgotten how old (and big) I was at the time.

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Yup. Pretty big. But that wasn’t a deterrent for our willful little pixie. Nope. She embraced the extra room and made it work!

Then, as was the case last year, she assigned our costumes: Mr. M would be Captain Hook and I would be Mr. Smee.

It was pretty easy for me to raid my closet and come up with a Mr. Smee outfit (blue stripes and I have been good friends this year), but Mr. M was a different story. The typical online pirate costumes I was finding online weren’t really great… and I didn’t want to spend $40… and then it was Halloween week and I was in a bind!

So…. I went to our local Goodwill, crossed my fingers, and went searching. There was nothing in the “Pirate costume” section, so I headed to the women’s blazer area and crossed my fingers one more time.

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And there it was! A Size 14 long red women’s blazer from the 80’s… just as I hoped! I went to a mirror, tried it on, flipped the collar up, and breathed a sigh of relief! That was done! Now for the hat! Well… that took some tedious time walking through the whole store… but at the last aisle I spotted something purple with a feather. I took a deep breath, grabbed it and flipped it over. Sure enough, there was a Disney Store label with Captain Hook’s photo on it… along with the glorious words ADULT M/L. I checked out of the store for $10.95, and went on to Walmart for fabric. For another $3.50, I bought a couple yards of 1/2” white bed ruffles, matching red cotton for the cuffed sleeves and gold satin for the jacket.

And after procrastinating until 8pm on Oct 30th to begin my sewing, this is what we got when 1am rolled around!

Yeah, I’m pretty shocked myself. Thank you Goodwill gods for being so nice to me this year!

So on Halloween night, we headed out into the cold in search of lots of candy.

We set our course to walk about a mile to get to our friends M & D’s house, and then came back.

But there wasn’t a house we missed on that entire journey! Miss L had quite the overflowing pumpkin of goodies!

We made one final stop at Grandma & Grandpa M’s house, and then it was home to enjoy that coveted single piece of Halloween night candy: a tootsie roll pop.

Happy Halloween 2013 from the star of the 2014 hit film starring Tom Hiddleston & Christina Hendricks, “The Pirate Fairy.”