If you remember my Halloween post from last year, you’ll understand the smile that spread across my face when I asked Camille what she wanted to be for Halloween this year and she replied, “Um . . . I think I want to be Anna.”
Ah, the bliss of my girlie wanting to dress up as the funny sister rather than the princess.
So on the night of the base festivities, she got all dressed up, hair braided and we headed to base, full of excitement.
And then she fell apart as soon as we arrived. I know a panic attack when I see one and she was feeling the fear. Mama Nutter has produced a baby nutter — poor girl.
I would blame the scary costumes that other people were wearing, but truthfully it started before she saw any of that. As we began the walk from the parking lot, her mind remembered it as a scary event from last year and she started to freak out.
I had one sobbing child clinging to my leg while trying to locate other kids to hand off their costumes and then I found out that Josh had to work late. Yay! I don’t enjoy Halloween much as it is, but doing it with a panicky child who is wailing, “I wanna go home!” was really not how I wanted to spend my evening.
At least my Survivor was having a good time.
I set Caleb free to run and collect candy and sat at the picnic tables on the fringe of the action, talking my scaredy-cat down off the ledge. Calvin was volunteering with the Marines at their booth, Carter was in Germany, and Josh was working so 50% of the family was having a good night.
After about 45 minutes of skeptically eyeballing the action and realizing that nothing bad was happening, she accepted some candy that Caleb brought back for her. The magic of sweets.
Best friends from school, unplanned matching costumes. Anna and Elsa together!
Josh finally got done with work so he and Camille ran the gauntlet. The only way she’d leave the safety of the table was to burry her face in Josh’s back so she didn’t have to see anything. The worst part was if she did see a scary costume she’d start screaming, be unable to look away, and start clawing Josh’s neck like a feral cat. Josh laughed and said, “She’s so much like you” about 10 different times. Thanks babe. Love you too.
Caleb in the costume contest. This survivor didn’t win. When I asked Caleb who the winners were he said, “Oh, one of them was the kid in the Army costume (you can see it in the photo above).” Um, baby? That’s a Marine. Don’t let your dad know that you can’t identify the uniform! (Though it has been about 8 years since we’ve been stationed at a Marine base.)
Calvin at work — the Marines put on a small haunted house that was so scary Caleb ran out in tears and was speechless and shaking for about 10 minutes.
The night ended up being a good time — just more work than I had hoped.
A few days later Camille had a special Halloween morning with her kindergarten class. Since the Anna costume was too hot, she opted for a cooler, breezier Elsa dress for trick or treating around the school.
A sweet tradition. The kindergartners have a “parade” where they walk around the school to various classrooms and trick or treat. My favorite part was that they go to some of the Middle School and High School classes and as they walk through, the big kids ooh and ah over the costumes and drop candy into their bags. Camille stopped and gave Cater a hug as they walked through his science class, but was moving too fast for me to get a photo of them together.
All done with big bags of candy to show for the effort! If you zoom in you can see that Camille’s teacher was dressed as the Boom Chicka Boom Boom tree from the famous children’s book. Her costume was perfect. Camille’s costume choice was very wise — it was so hot, we were all dripping and fanning ourselves. It’s always hot on Halloween here.
Next up was a morning of Halloween games, crafts, snacks and other fun.
Working on her bat. Yay for a tear-free Halloween celebration.
Our third and final Halloween was the big party that takes place at school every year: Spooktacular. After her experience on Spine Street (the base party) Camille was dreading this one days in advance. The afternoon of, she was begging me to stay home, pleading, “My heart is beating!!” Sorry girlie, I know how uncomfortable a pounding heart feels.
I was more than happy to stay home, but I also didn’t want her fears to keep her from having fun. I told her that she didn’t have to wear a costume and we didn’t have to stay long, but we were going to go in and see all the work the volunteers had done and to visit her brother, who was working in the Not So Haunted House with some other High School students.
Calvin is behind the big ID, holding it in place. They work on this project to get credit for their required volunteer hours. They had set up 4 different stations with games where the kids could win tickets to get prizes at the end. They did a really good job making a fun, non-scary place for the littles (and Caleb) to enjoy.
All smiles!
Once she’d seen the “man behind the curtain” and knew that Calvin was part of the event, none of the rest of it bothered her. She pronounced, “I’m not scared anymore!” which was exactly what I was hoping for. Baby steps.
One last thing. On Halloween, Caleb talked me into going out to the base Zombie run. It’s a 3K race where the participants wear flag football type flags and then have to dodge the zombies (volunteers in makeup) who try to steal the flags.
It takes place at night in the dark so there was lots of screaming as the zombies jumped out from behind light posts or behind buildings as we ran through base. I didn’t escape the zombies, but it was fun running from them!