Tio Jake & Auntie Scar: Channeling Martha Stewart

The next two days after touring downtown Chicago, we were all feeling a little wiped out! So we decided to stay in and be homebodies for a little while... but not without being productive at the same time!

On Wednesday morning I taught preschool for a couple hours while Jake and Scar got the rest of the house back into working condition.

Then we busted out our craft kits and started decorating for Kevin's Halloween Birthday Bash! We rearranged the furniture and cut out bats from construction paper...

Put together prizes for the costume contest, replaced family pictures with monster pictures, and then Jake helped me to make a "FAMILY" sign out of an old pallet our neighbors were throwing out!

A few days before Jake and Scar arrived I painted our china cabinet white, then Jake filled the windows with black paper and crayoned a skeleton on the inside! We also filled the fruit baskets with assorted gourds but they rotted super fast, so we replaced them with black and orange balloons! Then I hung the candy corn shadow box I'd made a few days before.

We mounted our ladder, spread spider webs on it, hung the shrunken heads, and glued some birds to it. Then Scarlet made a "Happy Halloween" banner to hang from it.

The shrunken heads really added so much to the whole thing. Thanks again go out to the boys for carving them for me!

We decorated the entertainment center with old vases and books, a skull from Walgreen's, and a board and frame we made with Edgar Allen Poe's Raven poem on them.

My friend Diana helped me cut out mice for the stairs a few days earlier and our "downtime" finally allowed me to put them up.

Then Jake hung more spider webs and spiders on the wall and I sewed black and white slip covers to go over my patio furniture cushions.

Jake even drew scary faces on my mirror with a dry erase marker!

And then he cut out some AMAZING silhouettes to put up in my windows.

This is what the front of my house looked like! Jake did such an awesome job!

Soon Kevin came home from work to help Jake build a pumpkin man...

And carve some Jack-o-Lanterns to round out our decorations!

But my work wasn't done quite yet! I still had to turn an old lady night gown and a fur coat that I picked up from Saver's into Halloween costumes for my girls!

 I got right to it and soon I had a miniature Princess Leia and her trusty Ewok companion Wicket!

And  because the costume is so much cuter with the stick, here is one more shot of Lily in her fur coat Ewok costume!