Vampires, silly nails and umbrellas on fire...

On Friday the kids spent most of the time at Sailing club making decorations for the party on the following evening. We hung lots of black paper bats in the windows and used 'sticky pad' stampers (created from scrap from our local scrapstore) to print halloween designs on banners. The children also helped make ghost meringues.

Ds2 decided on a sort of vampire theme. This was probably prompted by the sale of halloween items in Tescos - they only had capes, hats and teeth left - which made the choice fairly easy!

I spent about an hour on the Friday afternoon helping dd1 make a 'wolf' mask with cardboard and brown felt. Of course, she then decided she didn't want to be a wolf. In fact she didn't want to dress up at all!

Still despite this hiccup, we turned up at the Halloween party having made a little bit of effort. The cheap face paints from Tescos were handy for drawing spider webs on faces and other creepy things and the black nail polish was - er - interesting. I'd forgotten all about it until I got to work yesterday evening and saw that my fingernails were still black! One of the girls at work had dyed her hair red and I asked her whether she had done it for halloween. 'Er no' she said,'I just fancied a change'. Oops. Sometimes it's better if I keep my mouth shut.

Then I lashed myself into the traditional frenzy of pumpkin carving. There are some fantastic patterns you can download off the internet - last year we managed a fantastic scooby doo design - but this year I stuck to something fairly simple. I think the spider is still very effective, don't you?

The bonfire was initially a bit of a wash-out as we'd had heavy rain all afternoon and evening. Eventually it took light and as you can see, it managed quite a blaze.

Nice flames.

Dd1's umbrella isn't really on fire...honest

And then today at Sailing Club we lit the last remnants of the unburnt wood. Here's ds2 cooking - sorry - burning marshmallows with a very long stick (the fire was scorching!). We had to tie Jack up as he's not always the brightest hound when it comes to warm things. Having seen him stick his head in the oven on more than one occasion to get nearer the

warmth, I didn't trust him near a bonfire!

The rest of the day was taken up with book making. I have a fantastic book with lots of ideas for different sorts of books to make (origami ones, ones in the shape of a house etc). I'm not sure the kids were that enthusiastic as all my bunch were tired from too many late nights and early mornings, but hopefully it will trigger some thoughts and they might come back to it again.

As for home ed in general, we haven't really settled down into any more structure, apart from our weekly trips to the sailing club. We have started on 'The Story of The World' again and have picked up where we left off with 'Vikings'. I've promised the kids we will soon move on to Samurai and Knights. And yesterday we finally posted the letter that ds1 has written to his Australian penpal. I think we started it in September! These things take time...

And away from our little lives, in the news today: the USA now has a black president.