Happy Halloween!

For a country where Halloween is not really celebrated the Hughes kids are doing all right!  We had a big Halloween party at our house last Friday and we invited both of the girls classes from school.  Lots of girls came and our whole compound of families also joined the fun.  Our "sponsor family", that has teenage kids were a huge help with the Haunted House, they came the night before and helped us set it up, then the night of the party they all had assignments...Kelly and Katie were tourguides, Greg was the crazy guy in the shower in our maid's quarters, our neighbor Matt hid behind a dummy Kelly had made and moved the dummy's hand, Annalise (sponsor family) was a creepy fortune teller, another girl, Nicole, was in our scullery area hitting a cup along the security bars (like in jail) and finally Luca, who is a crazy, athletic 13 year old would scare people in the maids quarters, then jump up, crawl along the high wall and drop down and scare them again.  I guess he scared his own mother pretty good!  I sadly didn't get any great Haunted House pictures because I was too busy with hostess duties.

We did a costume contest to win buckets of candy.

 Here is everyone waiting to see who the winners are.

The girl dressed as Audrey Hepburn won for one group, our lovely judges were Miss Jenny and Miss Tanya.

Our neighbor girls in homemade costumes, their Dad was busy for a week! Lots of spray paint  and paper mache!  Middle one is a viking and one on the right (Opal- the girl Charlie told me he is going to marry) is Marvin the Martian from Bugs Bunny.

Katie (aka Katniss-note bow on shoulder) and some of her classmates.

 The toilet paper mummy game was as popular as ever, one neighbor didn't make it to the party so it was suggested we should take all the extra toilet paper down and decorate her house....

The best little mummy!  Kelly is in the background wrapping up Luka. (the crazy wall climber)

We had tons of treats and were dog sitting this amazing dog Jake, here he is sleeping under the treat table, for those of you that knew Murphy & Casey they would have been jumping up onto the table for treats!  Jake had a run in with barbed wire while chasing a cat...he had stitches so the kids called him FrankenWeenie.

We handed out bags of assorted American candies that we had shipped in and the best line of the night was one girl held up her bag of candy to show her Dad when he came to pick her up and she said, "See, American!"  (In our experience so far, South Africans think America is very cool)

Event 2= Trick or Treating at the US Embassy

The Embassy rolled out the red carpet for the kids yesterday and turned offices into Haunted Houses and had many dressed up people handing out candy.  The kids LOVED it!

These are offices and conference rooms converted!  There was a weird setting on my camera so everything was black and white.

I think the inside of the embassy really looks like an Embassy Suites hotel...I liked the witch climbing up the stairs yesterday and I'm not sure if you can see it in the photo but they put bloody handprints on the glass elevator-it looked freaky with people inside!

Final event is tonight, at the American School they are doing a Trunk or Treat event.  Since they call car trunks a "boot" here, the event is called Boo in the Boot. The kids are very excited about it!

Happy Halloween!