My Food Chain Gang

Remember that CNN.com article I wrote about the unusual names?  The article spotlighted a little girl named Indiana Elizabeth Jones and her brother, Dow.  Well, this post is not going to be about them.

Rather, it’s an excuse to post a cute photo of my 4-year-old daughter wearing an Indiana Jones-like costume.  For the real buffs out there, I know it’s not exact, but it’s still cute…

Our trick-or-treating was actually on Thursday, and we had lots of fun.  It’s a darn shame though that we lost our camera along the way, and even after numerous calls to the police station, it hasn’t turned up.  But after trick-or-treating, we went to our friends’ church party, and they took a Halloween picture of our whole family.  I wonder if they’ll sneak it into the newspaper next year to advertise their party.  They did that this year - imagine my surprise when I’m flipping through the paper the other day and there’s a picture of us from Halloween last year, dressed as a fish with my husband the monk beside me holding Pebbles Flintstone.

I just hope there wasn’t anything else too important on that camera.  Also, it was an expensive camera which my husband had won, not to mention the fact that we’re now without a camera.  We had to finish the rest of our Halloween celebrations without taking any pictures.  On tap today was the community Halloween party at the ice rink - there’s no ice in there yet.  Instead, they set up carnival games, bouncy castles, a cardboard box maze, and face painting for the kids.  They have hay (straw) rides through the ”haunted” fields, and each kid that attends gets a bag of popcorn and a trick-or-treat bag to put their candy in when they win it from the games.  It’s very cool, and the best part is that it’s all free - including hot dogs and punch for the whole family.  For some reason, this year’s turnout was a bit lacking - less than 1/3 of the people from last year I would estimate.  I guess it’s because they had it after Halloween this year?  I don’t really get why that would scare (haha) people away - a free fun thing for the kids including dinner?  It’d be hard to keep us away!  Since I only have one Halloween picture of the kids and they’re cute, I’m reluctantly sharing the whole family’s Halloween picture, myself included - I love dressing up for Halloween and wanted to get more mileage out of my less-than-$5 80’s costume.  One of the funnest things about dressing up is being creative and finding things that make a costume for a bargain.  Next year I want to be Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, so I’ll have to be on the lookout all year for a dress and shoes I can use.  Here is a list of people and costumes from this year:

Taylor - almost 9 years old - a costume she put together herself involving a dress, a cape, and devil horns
Sammie - 4 yrs - a princess
Disney - 2 yrs - a unicorn
Christopher - almost 3 mos. - a lion cub
Dad - an escaped inmate
Mom - a time traveller from the 80’s

Hope everyone had a great Halloween!

With the kids out of town and Friday the 13th upon us, we found it to be the perfect time to break out a game we found at the thrift store months ago - a Murder Mystery Party.  After a check to make sure all the contents were there, we started inviting friends to attend a murder mystery party at our house:

Dear Name of Character Here,
Hart’s untimely death casts suspicion on us all.  The police report has already been filed (see enclosed).  We must meet quickly in order to solve the murder and clear our good names.
Hosted By:
on Friday, June 13 at 6:00pm
Please RSVP by Wednesday, June 11
Please bring a dish to share - no poison

We sent this email to each guest along with the police report detailing the homicide.  We began with our game night regulars, then when some of them couldn’t make it, we tried to cast accordingly.  The casting, by the way, just happened to work out perfectly.  Originally, we were going to have to make a male character female, but once we switched some things around based on which guests were coming, it all worked out.  And in retrospect, the swapping male for female thing would not have worked well at all!  My husband and I were originally going to be the married couple, but those characters were a few decades older than us, and the characters we did end up playing had a secret infatuation with each other, so we were both pleased to discover this in the course of the game.  Unfortunately, when my turn came to come up with a ‘formal accusation’, evidence dictated that I point my finger at my husband, aka, secret crush, but that’s how you play the game.  Each guest came in costume and character and stayed that way for the roughly 3 hours we played the game.  All in all, a lot of fun, and we’ve already had several people who were disappointed that they couldn’t make it.  So, we’ll have to scour the thrift stores and / or the intenet in hopes of finding another one of these Murder Mystery games to play…  providing we can get all (almost 4!) kids out of the house for an evening again…  hmmm, that might be the REAL mystery!