Adventures in Party Planning: Halloween Returns to Thomas Place

I didn't realize how much I missed our house last year until we started decorating for Halloween.

(Pictured above:  the twelve year-old's alter ego, "Pimp Ghost," helping me decorate the front yard.  I added some friends to the image.   Gotta love Picmonkey's Halloween tool kit.)

I missed seeing my owls in the living room.

Whoo.  And woo hoo.

And my cats in the dining room.

Thanks to our forced remodel, I found new nooks and crannies for stuff this year - like this shelf in our bedroom, which acquired a spooky sock monkey friend.

The hallway is now Grand Skull Central Station.

And the new kitchen provided some excellent decorating opportunities:

Kitchen 2.0 got its first test drive when we had some folks over the weekend before Halloween - and passed with flying colors.  Plenty of room for storage, great layout for staging.

And lordy, lordy, did it feel great to get back in the entertaining saddle.  Even with one hand in a half cast or, as I chose to look at it, my "partial mummy costume").  

For the record:  Friend Robyn assembled the sausage eyeballs for me, I bought pre-sliced apples this time for the caramel apple bar (since it was the apples that probably did in my hand in the first place), and the cupcakes were store-bought, although the toppers were homemade.  See?  I really did learn a lesson about patience and discretion. 

I missed seeing my kids running through the house with their friends, like competing packs of wild dogs, eating all of the party food and clowning around with prop vampire teeth. 

I missed setting a table for Frimily Halloween Dinner (well, in my actual dining room - we still had Frimily Halloween Dinner last year in the apartment, but it wasn't the same).

I missed trick-or-treating in my own neighborhood with these ladies and their families.

I was so happy to be back in our house, and our 'hood, that I didn't pay - much - attention to the somewhat alarming fact that I no longer have cute Halloween children.  Our days of tiny pirate and brave knight costumes are long behind us.  Instead, I have these dudes:  a werewolf and "young, thin King Kong."  (Better than the red morph suit that he wore to a church youth group party the week before, and far more appropriate than Pimp Ghost.)

Luckily, Friend Robyn was gracious enough to birth this cutie, so I will still have someone to photograph in a pumpkin patch in the coming years:

See?  Some change is good.  Really, most change is good.  And, while the last year was a royal pain in my tuckus, the payoff is we got our house back, and in a lot of ways it's better than it was.

Looking forward to many more Halloweens - and Halloween parties - to come.