Halloween aka Where's Waldo Madness

Before we get to the Halloween fun, I wanted to share Carter's Kindergarten picture. Don't worry, we bought the copyright so it's legal to post here. If anyone wants the file to print off, we can email it to you in a larger file size (color or black and white)McKay has been coming home with all sorts of rhymes and songs from his preschool. This one is our favorite but there are other cute ones too. (If you'd like to see the others, I could post them too.) We tried to tell him the word is "too" but he insists he's right :)

Closed captioning: I'm a mean old witch with a hat and I fly on my broom with my cat. My nose is pointed and my chin is too(t). You better watch out or I'll scare you. Boo!

Carter wanted in on the action too.

Closed captioning: (Carter) Um... uh.. "Wearing Halloween clothes!" (Gabe) Did you just make that song up? (Carter) Yes. "There's a moon up the sky..." (Gabe) Did you just make that song up too? (Carter) It's the same.

Remember 'Where's Waldo?'? It seems like that guy was always lost in some wacky place with way too many people wearing red and white, like the picture below. Somebody mentioned him about a month ago while I was trying to decide what to wear for Halloween...
An image popped into my head.. "That's it!" I thought. "It would be so easy! And everyone would know who I am, not like when I was Professor Quirrell and my customers thought I was Johnny Carson doing Carnac the Magnificent... All I need are shoes (check!), blue jeans (check!), and a red and white striped shirt and beanie and some round glasses."It turned out to be more involved than I expected. For starters, no stores sell any clothes that Waldo might wear except the pants and shoes. No red and white beanies, no red and white striped shirts. You can't even buy round glasses anymore. We had to make everything from scratch. The shirts we made with red duct tape over long-sleeve white shirts, and found that duct tape doesn't stretch enough and had to be retaped on the person's body once the shirt was on. The glasses I bent out of pipe cleaners. The hats... um, I had to turn in my HeMan Club card and learn to knit. Suzanne and I knitted hats for something like a week while we watched TV at night. But the results are, well, see for yourself.

After we made the costumes, Carter said he didn't want to be Waldo for Halloween. It was too late to do anything else, so he was Waldo anyway. But any comment like "Oh, you're such a cute Waldo" was answered with "I'm not Waldo!" Next year we'll make sure he gets to choose his own costume.

"Carter, smile for the camera."

"No."

P.S. - the glasses didn't last long.

I wore my costume to work and got complimented on literally every single thing I wore. "I love your outfit!" "Did you make that hat? It's amazing!" "That shirt, why didn't I think of that! It's so cute!" "How did you make those glasses? You must be really talented." I even got complimented on my jeans (which was a little weird) and to complete the package I asked a coworker if she liked my shoes, and she said yes. Not one customer yelled at me all day - I might dress up more often. You might wonder why I made fake glasses when I wear real glasses. I'm near-sighted, so my glasses don't help within about 6 feet, so it's a pain to wear them and stare at my computer screen all day. Don't the boys look cute?Trick-or-treating! We went to a really busy neighborhood and we probably got over a hundred comments. "Look, it's a Waldo family!" "Where's Waldo? There he is!" "Look, matching Waldo costumes! That's so awesome!" I felt like a celebrity. There was one group of annoying teenagers who "found" us four or five times and I had to tell them to check out the book - Waldo-finding fun on every page. Other than that, we had a BLAST.
In case you looked but couldn't find him, Waldo is slightly to the left of the center of the left upper quadrant, behind the shoe sales table.