Fill Your Child's Dress-up Box on a Dime

After Halloween, we are left with costumes that have probably only been worn once or twice and will be outgrown by next year. So, what do we do with them?

Well, I throw them in a "dress-up bin" and the kids can dress themselves for imaginative play anytime they want. This year, we were all pirates.
Another great way to fill the dress-up bin, and thereby your child's imagination, is to hit the post-holiday sales. Halloween items are often 75% off the original prices. You can purchase a couple costumes and a couple wigs for under $10.

Furthermore, you can also go to yard sales, flea markets, thrift stores, or make your own crafty costumes and accessories.

Halloween and Autumn Creations With the Kids

This last holiday weekend brought lots of fun and business for the kids. Halloween and Autumn are always a fun focus to initiate the colder season to come.

Lynx particularly enjoyed the sewing projects he did, which is wonderful because it helps to center him. He designed and sewed a felt monster and sewed the face on a felt skeleton. This was his first experience with sewing ever. Lynx also is in the middle of putting together another monster with precut pieces.

Jaguar was busy making pipe cleaner finger puppets, matching ghosts and their different facial expressions, counting pumpkin seeds, sorting colored spiders, free painting with fall colors, making leaf pattern decorations, and more.

The boys also painted fall tree silhouettes on a sunset background with watered down paint and straws for the trees. I did one, too, because it looked fun.

Lynx helped me make homemade pumpkin pie…it is the best! Once you have pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin, you never want to go back to the can (although that can be pretty good too). We also made cranberry sauce and apple cinnamon peanut butter "sushi". They were simple, but very tasty.

Bobcat played with his treasure tray full of autumn themed sensory stuff and walked through a pile of fall leaves.

Before we went trick-or-treating, I sewed some bags for all the boys to decorate with fabric paint and potato stamps cut in the shapes of pumpkins.

Of course, I had the boys carve a pumpkin. We had one pumpkin and I went back to the store Halloween morning only to find all the rest of the pumpkins were completely wiped out. So, Jaguar carved one side, and Lynx designed and carved the other side.