October 31

I confess that I have always loved Halloween.  I grew up going trick-or-treating, going door to door with my friends until our bags were overflowing, driving to Memommy's house to get her famous popcorn balls and show off our costumes before we hit the street.  We even had a Halloween carnival at our church back in the day before we called them harvest or fall carnivals.  Anyway, since living overseas it has been hard to do much for Halloween because people don't really go trick-or-treating here and it's really not acknowledged much.  Also, as much as I love dressing up, I am just not that creative.  So, I got a little stressed when we were invited to a harvest/reformation party by some fellow home-schooling friends and the kids were invited to dress up like a famous historical character.  First challenge- coming up with three historical women that the girls would be excited about dressing up as.  Second challenge- confessing Naomi that Snow White is not a historical character.  Thankfully she got very excited about being Queeen Esther.  Biggest challenge- once we decided on the costumes- Pocahantas, the Egyptain princess Bithia (who rescued Moses from the Nile) and Queen Esther was figuring out how in the world to create such costumes with very limited resources.  There is simply not anything close to Hobby Lobby in Lebanon!  Enter my friend Kellie- crafting genious and my new hero.   I took her to the craft store with me and a few pieces of felt, a little glitter, a few pieces of some weird gold material stuff, and a hot glue gun turned into terrific costumes right before my eyes.  I can even honestly say that I helped!  But if you know me you probably also know that there's no way I came up with this stuff myself!

Here's Maddie as Pocahantas:

Abbey as Princess Bithia (I wasn't able to get a picture of AJ by herself as Naomi for once was very into posing...

And here's silly Naomi as Queen Esther:

                                                                

As part of the party that we went to, each child was invited to tell the crowd about their character and also recite something they had been learning from school.  Abbey and Maddie both did great, and even Naomi got up in front of everybody and sang one of the songs from the Veggie Tales version of Esther.  It was hilarious!                     

Here's all the kids dressed up at the party.  This family lives down in the south of Lebanon several hours away so we don't get to see them much, but the girls are so happy when we do.  They have five kids, and the only daughter, Jumeelee, is right between our girls and they have so much fun.  

We stayed with some other friends who let Jumeellee come over and spend the night and they were all thrilled.  That's been the hardest part of homeschooing is finding time for them to be with their friends.  The played so hard for almost 24 hours straight without hardly fighting at all and it was so perfect.