Over the weekend a handful of days ago (which feels like years ago) we celebrated Halloween at our house. We like many others opted to do Halloween the Pandemic SAFE way and roped off our porch & created/ used a 6 foot homemade Candy Chute to hand literal buckets worth of candy out to our neighborhood Trick-or-Treaters-!! But before getting into all that, first we’d like to share how cute our Fur Children were-!
We both dressed up in costumes as usual and our pets also dressed up as well. For once the two of us did a couples’ costume (for the first time in 7 Halloweens if you don’t count when our WHOLE fam went as “Rock”) and our 3 pets this time all coordinated-! We’d bought around 15 $2 Pet Halloween Costumes last year during 90% Off post-Halloween deals, so their costumes this round were uncharacteristically cool. Kevin the elderly rescue cat went as a Crab (or lobster…? we just liked calling him “Crabby” since he loathes costumes), Coco the 5 year old rescue doggo went as a Stingray, and Rizzo the ~1 year old rescue puppy went as a Hermit Crab-!
Jason had a little too much fun Photoshopping these 3 into their own underwater Halloween scene-! (Doesn’t it feel like our nation is under water right now…?)
We’ve been so lucky to have our cute (a bit neurotic) pets for the past 5+ years-! Prior to that we often played with and petsat for housemates’ dogs when we lived in California. Our puppy Rizzo’s 1 Year mark with us is in just a few days-!! Our cat Kevin has been with us for 5 full years and our dog Coco has been with us for over 4 years-!
Jason prepped for Halloween by carving his Covid-19 pumpkin for 3 days and even added some clay elements and paint to it-! (Sadly since Jenny was focused on too many Halloween projects she hasn’t yet even finished her cool pumpkin, but we’ll share it at some point later).
Jason dressed as a Pandemic Containment/ Emergency Response person and even fashioned his own sanitizing nebulizing machine and used it on his Covid-19 Pumpkin.
Jenny on the day of Halloween fully created a 6 foot tall neon venus flytrap out of a branch in our woods, a foam pumpkin, and some other supplies we got while buying items to make our Pandemic Candy Chute-!
In the days leading up to Halloween we fully created our pandemic Halloween Candy Chute from scratch-! We got a 6 foot PVC pipe, then spray painted orange and black candycane-type stripes all the way down it. Jason wanted to add to the end a bit of fun and we had a curved end that shot the candy up & out (which hilariously often shot over kids’ heads as they ran out to catch it)!
In our 90% Off post-Halloween shopping haze last year (in 2019) we also bought 5 cent to 50 cent Halloween light up reusable accessories for the Trick-or-Treater kids that we stored to use this year-! There were tri-mode light up cat ears, light up Halloween batons, light up pens, light up necklaces, and so much more-!! The kids seemed to love that we used a long robot arm pole to also gift them these toys in cloth Halloween bags IN ADDITION to the candy that we sent them flying out of the Candy Chute-!
We blocked off our porch & steps with clear plastic and Danger tape because we still wanted kids to be able to see the light up decorations and all of our crazy pumpkins on the steps-!
Our friends were the FIRST Trick-or-Treaters at our house (since they were only coming to us and 2 immediate family members’ homes with their son) and we were so excited to see these spooky ghosts! They just bought a house right by us and moved here from California over a month ago, so it’s been good to distance chat with them and catch up!! We were so excited to meet their son as well-! He was SUCH a spooky ghost and had so much fun playing drums with his light up Halloween goodies on our 140 pound pumpkin out front!
By the end of the evening even our dogs got to come out and enjoy the porch since it was all roped in and roped off! They enjoyed the light up Halloween decor too and checked out every corner of the decorated porch (their first time enjoying it out front, but not the last since we bought a porch baby gate long enough to fit across our wide steps-! They’ve already gone out there once or twice more since then)!
This year has been VERY intense for most of us and honestly giving out toys and candy to kids this year really gave us a moment of fun. We were relieved to hear how excited kids were and how amused their parents were with our costumes and our vintage Halloween crazy insane decor (a reminder here: https://www.jennyandjasonphoto.com/blog/pandemic-halloween-2020-south-bend-indiana ). This Spring started out TERRIFYINGLY, so after Jenny was better from being sick for the first 3 weeks of March, we then decorated for Easter in between digging and making 2 full huge new perennial flower gardens and doubling the size of our food garden. People have really seemed to appreciate and thank us for decorating for ALL of the holidays this year, so it’s seemed like a win-win: Destressing/ happiness for us AND happiness/ amusement for folks walking he neighborhood! We even decorated for 4th of July (also voicing our political beliefs with a couple flags).
As of this week we’ve already fully decorated our house for Autumn/ Thanksgiving. It cheers us up to see the fun decor especially during the stress of this autumn. We definitely plan to keep decorating and will decorate for December/ Christmas/ holidays as well as Winter at large with $5 vintage human-sized light up Snowmen Blow Molds that we also got this year-! It may be visible/ obvious that we’re trying to make our house fun & cheery amidst the stress, fear, and gloom, but whatever it takes, right…? We hope some of these photos brought you some Autumn cheer in this weird stressful week.
_________________________**Check back in NEXT Weekly Wednesday for some tips on when & how to get Professional Family Portrait Sessions and Engagement Sessions-! We have 10+ years of advice on when to book, what different times of the year look like, what to look for in your Professional Photographer, what the prices on average are, what to expect, and more-! We are still working away at our clients’ photo (weddings and more) edits AS WELL as client printed photo orders with some more Family Portrait Sessions lined up for the last nice weather of the season (with all work staying perfectly On Time as usual), so while we work, we look forward to also creating this next Weekly Wednesday blog on the crucial tips to a successful Professional Portrait Session-! Catch ya next week-!