Giving up on a Perfect Halloween

My aspirations are not too terribly high. I would only like to be finished baking, packaging and curling ribbon by tomorrow morning. Just in time for the pre-school jam-your-face-full-of sugar sessions.

I don't know why, but Halloween has escalated in the holiday category to somwhere in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe that's reaching a little, but it has made a large jump above St. Patrick's Day, so there are pre-school parties to be had and little gift bags to be packaged. There are also party sign up sheets with positions to be jockeyed for.

In Ollie's class I won a pizza! YES! Swing by the pizza place and have glorious delivery goodness for $5. In Henry's class, I missed the boat and am baking cupcakes. That's okay, though because it gave me the opportunity to buy orange icing. I don't believe I've ever suffered through decorated with it before!

So far, I've done the cupcakes {ran out of vegetable oil and found out you can sub apple sauce!! Wonderful and fluffy cakes- love that tip!} - notice I got rid of the rest of those darn sugar pumpkin things that keep making their way into my mouth-
and the baggies, but still need to work on the teacher cookies

and the ribbon curling on the kiddos' baggies. {bags shown below are lovingly placed on top of a MOUND of 3 loads of laundry needed to be folded}.

I know I need to give up on perfect, like my friend Mary encourages, but this is actually the stuff I love about being a mom more than the macaroni stuck to my jeans.

Did you know that my family owns a florist? My aunt and uncle run it and we always grew up working there in the summers and over Christmas break during college. So, curling ribbon is in my blood. And I love a good teacher gift! Something about the smell of sucking up gift giving in the morning gets me out of bed.

Halloween has come a long way from the years where we roamed the streets barely breathing through our masks and asking complete strangers for candy. To think- there wasn't even a trunk in sight!

But I'm happy for a fun excuse to have a party.
And we won't even have to have slobber on the inside of our plastic Smurf masks!
We've come a long way, baby.

I'm off to finish the fun stuff, but here are a few updates:

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#1- This post is linked to my good friend Mary's Giving Up on a Perfect Halloween at Giving Up On Perfect. Go over there and tell her "hey" {scrounge up a Southern accent if you don't have one} and see all the other wonderful Halloween stories there. She is having AMAZING giveaways, so go comment, link your stories and participate.

#2- BIG ANNOUNCEMENT
I am super, duper excited that I will have a post published at (in)courage tomorrow {Saturday}!! WOW! So thrilled and thankful. (In)courage is the website and blog for Hallmark's Christian division- Dayspring. I would love for you to check it out! EEEK!

#3- Our fun 80s Halloween party we were planning for earlier has been postponed for now. One of the hosts has the swine flu {the dad of the family! Oh no!}, so they figured they would keep that to themselves.
Thank you.

#4- You can still enter the Create a Caption giveaway to win a $25 Chili's gift certificate! You can do it!! If anything, go read the other comments. Y'all are hysterical!