I love when people decorate for holidays, I do.  But EVERY DAY, we drive down the only road to the elementary school, and pass by what the kid and I refer to as “the Gore House.”  No simple pumpkins or ghosts or skeletons here.  This guy goes all out:  customized with expanding spray foam painted blood-red, he FILLS his yard full with buckets of fake guts being poured onto a table, where plastic ravens eat them.  There’s a full-size BBQ grill full of guts and fake bloody intestines, and something called “The doll house” (thanks to the giant wooden structure over his front door) with “dead babies” hanging from it.  Fake bloody.  There are disemboweled mock people, positioned into torturous poses, others getting electrocuted with their foam guts hanging out.  This assault on my eyeballs, goodness sake!   I mean, it’s his house, and he’s got a right to decorate it I guess.  Myla always asks me to tell her when the house is coming up so she can turn her head.

Maybe I’m all sensitive now that I’m older, but gore is not Halloween to me.  I mean, I guess in a way it is, but…seriously?  On the only road to an elementary school?  I don’t know.  No, it doesn’t have to be all cute and fluffy, but DANG.

SOooo that being said, the kid has slowly come to enjoy the fun spookiness of getting lightly scared at the Spirit store by things that jump and pop up.  Funny stuff.  I thought it’d be fun last time we went to let her pick out a couple of prosthetics and see what she’d do if I let her just go crazy making me into something else.

She excitedly picked out some horns and an eyeball.  Her goal?  “To scare daddy right out of his pants!”

So apologies if this post is heavy with selfies, but I was trying to get good pics of what she was doing, because she learned so much.  And she learned about spirit gum, and how you can use it to attach things to your skin.

She carefully did her best to make it “realistic,” as if I just sort of grew these horns straight outta my face.  (We always use Snazaroo facepaints, because we both have sensitive skin, and I learned early on that it was the only one that didn’t break us both out in a rash.)

I helped a little around the eyes, and Myla did her best to make it as scary as her lil 8-year old mind could, saying “Daddy is going to be SOOOO scared!!”  (…Considering my husband isn’t at ALL a fan of horror, her goal wasn’t exactly unrealistic…)

So there it is!  Easy and fun, for any kid to do!  Now’s a fun time, because those little Spirit Halloween stores have so much to play with.  It doesn’t have to be much–I think both of these pieces cost around $7, and the fun we had making a monster was worth it.

Incidentally, I didn’t exactly scare the pants off Daddy (although he did say I looked terrifying), but he did get a good laugh out of it…

Especially when she asked if I could do the same to her, and I let her tell me where to put everything…She did her own makeup on this one, too…

So, yeah, a little paint-on blood?  I can see that.  I’m not a nun or anything.  But this is about as gross as we get.

What are you all doing for Halloween?  Does Halloween mean gore and guts to you?  Or just spooky fun?