Life as I know it: Halloween!

This Halloween had to be the most fun for me and Ryan! We turned the facade of our home into a spider web covered haunted house. We had a strobe light lighting up the glow in the dark spiderwebs that were also lit by a black light. We had dry ice to create a thick fog on the porch and cascade down the steps to the side walk, which was lit by a blue light. Red light bulbs inside gave an eerie glow to the windows. We set up the computer monitor in the picture window with a video loop of what looked like a ghost caught in a TV with bad reception...that caught the eye of every child and stopped them in their tracks! To add to the fright, Ryan dressed up like a vampire, painted his face gray with purple streaks and fake blood streaming out of his mouth and down his chin. He wore all black with a long black cape. He would hide by the tree in our front yard and he was so camouflaged that no one would see him, so jumping out to scare them was a piece of cake!

I helped take the attention away from him along with the cover of darkness. I dressed up like "Phantom Of the Opera's Wife" as one trick-or-treater called me. I wore a black and white dress with a red hooded cape, bright red lipstick and I wore the venetian mask we found in Venice on our honeymoon. I would sit like a lifeless mannequin in a chair with the candy bowl at my feet. I would wait until the kids got close to the candy and would jump out at them and yell "BOO!" They would scream, jump, and scatter back to their parents. Some kids were so scared to come get candy that they made their parents come up with them, so I would get both the kids and the parents! I had one little boy get so scared he wouldn't come back to get candy, so his mom carried him back over to the candy bowl and she had to reach in the bowl for his candy. Since everyone thought they had already gotten their 'trick', they weren't paying attention to the vampire (Ryan) creeping up behind them! They would scream and some of them would run down the sidewalk or out towards the street!