Happy Halloween!

A few days before leaving for Nepal I casually mentioned to one of my neighbors that Halloween was in October and that I was thinking of throwing a party for the kids. Next thing I know I'm being bombarded with questions about costumes and my house is swarming with kids begging me to make Halloween come quickly. I got home from Nepal and had one week to plan my party, buy supplies, make a costume and get everything ready, plenty of time! But then I got sick and had to hop on a 5 hour bus ride to see the doctor, and had to stay there for four days. I got back home the day before Halloween and the second the kids knew I was back they were running rampant through my house asking me about the party that was supposed to be happening the very next day. I had nothing ready, was not feeling great, and kicked them out of my house telling them the party was postponed until Saturday night. I felt pretty bad about postponing it, so I decided to use the extra time I bought myself and make it an awesome party for my favorite little kiddos.

By 8:30 on Saturday morning I had 5 kids at my house asking me about the party, making my house a mess, and playing game after game of UNO while begging me to play with them. Meanwhile, I was  making them homemade chocolate chip cookies. This might not seem like much of a feat to any of you, but when you are using a small oven that barely fits a 9x9 pan and have to sit on the floor for 3 hours while you cook 4 cookies at a time, you'll understand how much effort it takes to make some simple cookies. Then I spent an hour killing spiders. I do this every Saturday and am actually starting to enjoy it. I get this massive broom and take down spider after spider. I feel kind of bad killing these spiders because they mainly stay up in the corners of the house and don't bother me, but if I don't kill them every week then I'm pretty sure they would take over my entire house. I would guess that this Sunday I killed around 30 spiders without trying very hard. Then I swept, mopped, hand-washed my laundry, made lunch for everyone, and finally sat down to take a break. But of course my break turned into me teaching the kids a new card game (War), and then yelling at them as they ran across the floors I had just finished mopping. After lunch I made spaghetti sauce and hot dogs, got the snacks ready, and made goodie bags for each of the kids coming to the party that night. At 4:30 I kicked everyone out and told them not to come back until 6 so I could shower, cook the pasta, and do my Halloween makeup. By 5:15 they were all back and running through my house like crazy people getting the party started. They shut all the windows and doors, turned the lights off, played some Gangnam Style, and started a dance party. After we were all exhausted and sweaty from dancing, the witches, wizards, ghouls, and ghosts plopped themselves on my floor and began munching down on some cookies and snacks while making jack-o-lanterns by coloring scary faces on balloons. Then we all enjoyed some homemade spaghetti and I gave them each a hot dog (hot dogs are for rich people in Thailand so most of the kids never get to eat them but they LOVE them). After dinner we played pin the tail on the black cat followed by a game with a blind fold where the kids had to say Happy Halloween in a scary voice and the blindfolded person had to guess who was speaking. Every time someone "won" a game I added an extra treat to their goodie bag. The kids had a blast and I'm pretty sure they are already looking forward to Halloween next year. They also want to know when the next holiday is. Hopefully by Thanksgiving I can work up the energy to throw another party.