Beware the Holloway home on Halloween!

We're all decorated for Halloween now. Our neighborhood is pretty much the perfect Trick-or-Treating neighborhood. 42 houses, all fairly close together on one well-lit street that is one big circle that's all a one-way street. Takes about an hour and half for little kids to finish our neighborhood. Big kids could probably run through it in under an hour. So we get a lot of trick-or-treaters and we take our Halloween decorating seriously.

We had some left over plywood from our still-not-yet-complete basement cabinet project, so Braden used it to make a coffin. And some more of it to make a tombstone. Then Blythe and Ethan helped him paint blood marks on them with red paint. Actually there are 2 tombstones - one says "Cavaliers" and one says "Heels". He made the coffin big enough so he could fit in it (one of his many ways to scare the prospective trick-or-treaters).

And then there are the lights. Oh the lights. We've been adding to our collection each year (actually I'm pretty sure my mother-in-law has purchased all of them for us). We have: skeletons, candy corn, pumpkins, and now bats. Oh, actually Braden did buy some orange ones that come in a net to put up as well. Throw in a few decorative bats and we're all set.

Ha! Yeah, right...that's not it! On Halloween, we'll add some dry ice inside the coffin so the smoke filters out through the slits Braden left in it. And Braden will dress up in his scary Freddy Krueger costume and sit perfectly still holding the candy (until someone tries to take a piece!). And we'll add the scary Halloween music from the CD Braden already made.

Oh and duh - by Halloween I'm sure we'll have at least 5 pumpkins to carve. For now we just have the one seen in the picture. In exploring the neighborhood the other day, Braden, Ethan, and Blythe found that someone had planted a pumpkin patch in one of the common area flower beds by the front entrance. The nerve! Since they were in the common area, we picked one.