This year, the core group of ladies who always run/organize the Halloween Carnival decided to do things a little differently. Rather than have one person in charge of the whole shebang, we would divide up the responsibilities. That way no one would get burnt out, and we would still want to do it again the next year. I volunteered to organize the booths; who would run them, what they would be doing, etc. It wasn’t a hard thing, but it was time consuming. It took several emails and a few phone calls to round up enough people to have a good variety of games for the kids to play. I am so thankful for the people who spontaneously offered to run booths. There were even a few super awesome folks who have no children to bring to the fun, who were still willing to sacrifice an entire Saturday afternoon and help out. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
No matter how hard I try to be super organized, the morning of the carnival is always a mad race to finish up all the little things I wanted/needed to bring to the party. This year was no exception. Fortunately, the kids are old enough to give me real help, so they took over decorating the mini-cupcakes for the cake walk. We made little pumpkins and spiders. They were so cute! But I made way, way, way too many, and we ended up tossing about half of them. We were all too sugared out from candy to eat them afterwards, and not many were eaten at the actual party. Oh well, they were still fun decorations.
Part of the extra stress came when Sophie reminded me about a week before the party that she wanted to be Alice in Wonderland this year. I was convinced that we had a blue Cinderella dress-up dress in the box, so I would only need to make a little white apron and she would be good to go. No, no Cinderella dress to be found anywhere. So I ended up having to sew one, which took about 2 solid days, and put my whole schedule seriously behind. But it turned out so cute, and she can wear it next year, as well as save it for Alexandra when she gets older, so I think it was worth it. I mean, look at her! 
And yes, the bottle in her pocket does have a tag that says “drink me” on it. 🙂
Everyone else wanted to go as something they had already been in previous years, which really saved my sanity. Noah even let Kaela put on his vampire makeup, which helped people to know what he was a lot better than last year.
Sarah wore the costume I made her last year, and Alex wore one from several years ago, that I think we got for Sarah when she was small. 
Man, kids in Halloween costumes are just so adorable!
And just the right amount of scary. 🙂
Nick, Chris and I all wore our matching Jack-o-Lantern shirts and called it good. He didn’t play any of the games, at 13 he was too old for that, but he gladly ran one of the booths for me.
I had a lot of fun decorating the jar for this one. And I think next year, I will do three smaller jars, filled with different things, so that more people have a chance to win.
Here is my cake walk, that almost no one visited, and those who did, often didn’t want my cupcakes. Hmmph! 
I think next year, I will just scratch it completely and do something totally different. No idea what, but I have a year to think about it.
The kids got quite a bit of candy this year, and were super happy with the carnival. Next year we will be in our own building, which will be really nice, even if it will be a bit smaller. We can have it any day we want, not a week early like this year because the building was already scheduled. We can easily go over the night before and do most of the setting up and decorating, so that we don’t have to worry about it the day of the actual party, and it will be easier to get all our non-member friends to come because it will be so close and easy to find, not in the middle of Zurich! Yes, I am already making big plans. 🙂
After cleaning up, which went surprisingly quickly thanks to everyone pitching in and helping out , Sarah grabbed the camera and snapped a few of her famous quirky photos. But this one was rather pretty, and deserves to be immortalized on the blog. 