Tonight is Halloween. The time when all the ghouls and ghosts, witches and all manner of supernatural things come out to play. We all get dressed up, play games and search for sweets and chocolate.Made into a massive holiday from America, this day is becoming more and more popular. It is one of our favourite times in our house.
Generally I find there are two types of Halloween people. The people who put there efforts into the costume and master the art of dressing up the people who work on their houses and create the most elaborate spooky haunted houses for people to visit.
As all my kids forage for candy each year we with 5 under 10s are dressers up. Luckily for us my parents go to town to decorate their house and have now got a sizeable collection of creepy, scary items so they can transform their garden into a haunted house.
We love Halloween. Carefully choosing our outfits for the kids, walking round in the dark getting together with our other friends with more children than sense ha ha. Me and Mrs Berg love joining in. This year we are bananas, in every sense of the word.
As you can see we never leave our house undecorated. As part of our tradition we all carve pumpkins and leave them outside. Over the years I have become rather a good pumpkin carver and pride myself in developing my pumpkin carving skill each year. The kids draw up a design. Hollow out the pumpkins and then I carve them to there design. I always do one myself too because I’m such a big kid.
This year we have a rather serious dilemma in that it’s the first year since my son was diagnosed with Type 1. What do we do about all the sweets he and his siblings will gather? Is it fair for him to see? Is it fair for him to be excluded? Well it is each parents own decision as to how to respond. Obviously banning sweets altogether would be the preferred choice. Some people just carb count the sweets and let them consume as much as they want. There was even a clever parent I read about who bought toys for his neighbours to give to his son as he did the rounds.
We definitely don’t want to exclude him from collecting the sweets as that is a big part of the festivities. Also we would find a certain awkwardness from requesting from everyone at the door a Diabetic alternative. So he collects as normal but when he gets home he can pick a handful of his favourites (to eat in smaller carb counted portions throughout the week) and the rest he can trade to us for a prize. Thankfully the promise of Lego can be our greatest ally in the fight against diabetes.
I find that their is a lot more to do on Halloween than sweets so we like to concentrate on bringing the family together for games and carving pumpkins, telling spooky stories and scaring each other, and finally sitting down at my mums haunted mansion after a cold night out and eating Potato Hash.
I will show you our photos of our night tomorrow.
I wish you all a spooky, scary Halloween. I hope you have a good time.
Berg
Bergs Place 