Photo Boo!th

Alright, I've accepted it.  It was difficult, and a little heart breaking, but I've come to terms with it.

Roy is not as obsessed with Halloween as I am.  It's just not his favorite holiday.  It's more like his eighth favorite holiday, right there after Labor Day.

Of course he totally supports my love for Halloween, wants me to decorate and all {um, eventually we will have a place to decorate} and he'd go along with anything.  But I'm learning to make some adjustments, just so he doesn't have to suffer through my insanity.

For example, last year I begged him to help me carve a pumpkin.  And we did have fun, but digging his hands in sticky pumpkin guts is probably his least favorite things in the world.  This year I skipped the begging and Roy just worked as the official camera man.

This is us trying to figure out what we're going to do with our pumpkins.  We all planned to enter them into a pumpkin carving contest that weekend, so we had to think creative.

Last year Roy took me to a pumpkin patch because he knew that I love the whole hay ride, snip-your-own-pumpkin thing.  This year I was satisfied with browsing through the produce at Safeway.  We'll hit up the real deal again for sure, but maybe not every year.  It'll make it more exciting when we do go!

 Roy is pretty good with that camera, isn't he?  And you know, he did actually carve about a quarter of one of the eyes, like a champ.

 Here's how they turned out...

Zac's:   {the seeds hardened into a perfect mohawk}

Simon's:  {complete with blood}

 Mine and Roy's:

Fun times.

Then Saturday night we went to the Halloween party at our church.  I signed us up to run a booth, just for fun.  I hadn't been to one of these parties in five years or so, but I remembered the gist.  Game, prizes, etc.  But I had no idea what we were going to do.

It was Roy who came up with the Photo Boo!th idea.  We recruited Zac and Simon to help us out, and we actually got pretty into it.  The idea was to have a spooky backdrop and take some nice pictures of kids all in their costumes.  We figured parents would love that.  We planned to have an iPad with us, and email the pictures to the parents right there on the spot.

So we transformed a Sunday School classroom from this...

To this!

But the guys took it a little bit further, and decided it would be funny to scare a few people too.  You know, catch the moment of terror on their faces.  The only problem was figuring out how young was too young to scare.

We needed to have someone in there who was 100% not scary.  So that's where my costume comes in.

I'm the princess.  Roy is the pea.  {Another Halloween adjustment for me... low maintenance costuming!  Nothing but the letter P and an old prom dress.}

But in the Photo Boo!th, Roy was a little scarier than a pea. 

He hid behind the backdrop with a werewolf mask on his face.  Zac also took a turn with the mask during the night.  Once the scarer was hidden, I would welcome in the group.  If Zac was doing the scaring then Roy was helping traffic people, and he insisted on saying, "Welcome to the photo boooooooooth," in a ghostly voice.  Love that dork.

So the group would shuffle inside and I'd set them up against the backdrop.

"You look great.  Just scoot back a little bit, between the tables so you don't cover up the decorations."

{Yes, closer to the curtain!  Muahaha!}

Then "3... 2... 1..."

And Roy or Zac would grab someone's arm and growl or scream as I took the shot.  The result was hysterical.  I have to show you some of the shots, but I've purposefully chosen the blurrier ones just in case someone would rather not have the disgrace of being featured on my blog.

I just realized that all the pictures I've included are of teenage girls.  But we got plenty teenage guys, adults, little kids— no one was safe!

But we didn't want to make the little ones cry.  Luckily, the princess getup worked like a charm.  Roy would just poke his scary head out and it was enough to send them running toward the princess.  I'd get down to their level, point at Roy and say, "Who is that?  Look, it's just silly Roy!"

Roy would take off his mask and give them a goofy smile and wave.  This always made them laugh and forget that they'd just peed their pants about three seconds ago.

Overall, the Boo!th was a success.  Some emails ended up not working, and then there were a couple of families that wanted a legitimately nice photo taken of them.  Whoops!  But we had a blast putting it all together.

Here is my only picture of Zac and Simon, which I took on my phone.  Proof that they were there, they helped set it up, and they helped run it.  I sent the picture to Mom and Dad in New York.  Mom was so happy the boys were entertained, she didn't say anything about me jacking all of her decorations from her house.  :-)

Holed up in the booth, we missed the rest of the party: dinner, costume contest, pumpkin carving contest, etc.  But Roy and I were able to make it to our trunk for the trunk-or-treaters.  Chilling in the back of your car for an hour and getting to see a whole parade of costumes at once is way nicer than getting up and answering the front door every five minutes. 

Two huge empty bags of candy later we were cleaning up the booth.  That's when I learned that my pumpkin won the category of "Scariest" in the competition.  Woohoo!  Too bad I wasn't there to get my prize, or even to claim bragging rights.  Oh well.  Roy is sure that his handiwork on a quarter of one of the pumpkin's eyes is what pushed us to victory.  What would I do without him?

By actual Halloween, Mom and Dad were home, and Mom wasn't about to let us go out the door without some kind of costume.

You can see where I get my insanity from.

I was already wearing the t-shirt, but Mom pulled together random things she had decorated the house with and really completed my look.  Mom had Roy put on the shirt, but luckily for him she didn't have any huge glasses on hand.

I walked into work with this awesome witch hat and broom and earned some laughs.  The UPS man appreciated my dressing up too.  Out of all the offices he'd delivered to that day, he said not enough people had dressed, maybe because Halloween was on a Monday.  There's like some unspoken rule about not enjoying yourself on Monday, I guess.

Poor Roy was the only person on the whole U of A campus who was dressed up.  But hey, maybe people saw him and just thought he always parts his hair down the middle.  Hehe!

{If you can't read it very well, his shirt says "Assistant to the Regional Manager."  He's Dwight from the Office.}

  Though Zac and Simon were both equipped with Teletubbie costumes...

they didn't want to go trick-or-treating that night.  Simon said in Germany trick-or-treaing it is only a big deal for little kids.  So we decided to do something less kiddish on Halloween night.

NIGHTFALL at Old Tucson!  With Austin Farr, a family favorite friend of Zac's.

Warning: if you are going to take your kids to Nightfall, do not go to any of the shows unless you're okay with them learning about incest and just about every curse word there is.  Of course we expected the blood and stuff, but they tried way too hard.  And you know what?  The explosions aren't even that cool.

Other than that disgusting, braincell damaging half hour, we had a great time.  There are several spook alleys or haunted houses to walk through, which is always a favorite for me.  I like the thrill as long as Roy is right there {and he's resisting the urge to contribute to the spooking}.

For some reason Zac felt less freaked out when he had me in a headlock and dragged me along beside him.  The first two spook alleys I really didn't see much beyond Zac's armpit.

We all agreed that our favorite part of the night was watching mom book it through the dusty streets, trying to evade the costumed creeps that were constantly singling her out.

There was a dead cowgirl wielding an ax, there was a masked man with a chainsaw, a clown on bouncy stilts- these workers were everywhere.  Their job was to make people scream.

I can understand why they'd pick on mom.  There's not a lot of cute little ladies walking around, noses nose stuck in a map.  Without fail, every time one of the creepers was near, they went after mom.  She would jump, scream, try to hide behind someone else, run around in circles, and the rest of us would just stand there laughing our heads off. 

Happy Halloween!