Dog Bat Costume

I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween!

As you can guess from the title and pictures, our Halloween had a bit of a Super Mario twist. My 4 year old has been really into Mario lately and spends his iPad time watching all kinds of silly youtube video game reviews. When he decided in early September that he wanted to go as Mario for Halloween, I was a bit worried it might be a phase and he might change his mind. Lucky for me, the Mario love is still going strong and my little guy was more then happy to dress up as his favorite video game character.

For my little girl, I had picked up an adorable owl costume on clearance from Old Navy last year, but she was none too fond of it and big brother insisted she should be Princess Peach. There is only so long he is going to want to coordinate with his little sister, so I had a hard time saying no to the request. I do love themed costumes and it ended up working well with the princess obsession Keira has developed over the past month.

I wasn’t going to buy the dogs new costumes, but them ended up being 75% off when we went to the petstore so I let Camden pick one out for each of them. He chose a bat for Rumbull and a bumble bee for Nova since there are bats and bees in some of the Mario lands. The dogs and kids were not as coordinated as I have done in the past, but it worked!

I wanted to do some special treats for my Mario to hand out at his preschool Halloween party so I ended up coming up with these cute candy filled mushrooms. They were a bit time consuming, but it was an easy craft and all the kids seemed pretty excited to receive them. I will try to get a tutorial up for them in the next couple weeks for anyone planning a Mario party.

And, of course, we had to have a Mario themed pumpkin! Using a big round pumpkin with a nice long stem, and 3 mini pumpkins I was able to put together this cute bomb pumpkin.

It did require a bit of time for spray painting and assembly, but this is one of the easy pumpkins I have ever carved – just two oval eyes! After I was finished, Camden made a point to tell me I did a really good job, so that’s all the validation I needed.

On Halloween we ended up going to the mall again for a little bit. At the mall, Keira was excited to see the animals and bounce in the bouncy castles, while Camden was very excited to have the balloon guy make him a hammer! He has been insisting all week that his Mario costume needed a hammer but I never got around to getting him one. This couldn’t have worked out more perfect and he proudly carried it the whole evening out trick-or-treating.

The bouncy castle at the mall even fit our Mario theme with it’s big toadstool, bouncing turtle and giant plants!

After a quick dinner, we met with some of the neighbours and went out trick-or-treating for a bit. The weather was fairly decent for this time of year and my little Princess did really well for her first time out. The kids all had a lot of fun and it was so nice for Camden to actual have other kids to go out with this year instead of just boring old me!