Well, unless you’re from another country that doesn’t celebrate Halloween, you probably spent the last weekend scrambling for costumes for your little ones – or maybe even yourself!

I’ll admit, Halloween is my all-time favorite holiday. It’s just the right combination of gruesome and charming to satisfy my sensibilities. And I do go a little all-out. Not as much as some people mind you. I mean, I really admire those folks who erect entire haunted houses in their garages, complete with that fake- looking scarecrow sitting in a chair that turns out to be real when you walk by. BOO!

When I was younger and living in KC, every Halloween my friends and I would go haunted housing and back then they were AWESOME! That was before all the safety laws that prohibited carefully hidden slides that would unexpectedly send you plummeting to a lower level or kept “performers” from touching people and scaring the bejeezus out of them. I blame this on Personal Injury attorneys and hairline fractures. They’ve taken the fun out of Halloween. A different kind of Boo!

So now I focus my spooky energies on my kid, who has inherited my love for all things fanciful, dramatic and, well, over-the-top. So naturally when she decided the day after Halloween last year (and she ALWAYS decides her costume a year in advance) that she wanted to be a GLAM VAMPIRE for this Halloween, we hit the after Halloween clearance sales and stocked up on all that was glitzy, gruesome and glamorous. And we got it at 50 to 75% off!

And this is what we came up with. Yeah, she won her 3rd grade costume contest and managed to put a fright in multiple parents who saw the ghost of teenagers future (specifically their teens) when they looked at her. And they could be right. The fake lip ring and nose piercing was my kid’s idea. She also picked the costume, the hairdo and the rhinestones. We decided on the design together. I drew it. Oh, and the little rhinestone bite marks on her neck were my idea.

Amazing what cheap rhinestones, eyeliner pencil and eyelash glue can do, huh?  The cost of the whole get-up, including the dress? Less than $20 bucks. Sure it took over an hour to apply all those rhinestones TWICE (once for her school’s Halloween Festival and once for Halloween). But it was worth it. My kid was happy and I got to channel my creative energies on my favorite holiday of the year!

Mommies need creative outlets too.