Halloween Party 2014: It Lands!

Another year, another great Halloween party

We started off with the glowing invitations here.

Unfortunately, the party décor - glowing items against a totally dark backdrop - was extremely hard to photograph, but you'll have to trust me, everything looked great.

We trained three RGB DMX lights on the front of the house that lit up the entire façade with slowly "breathing" pulses of blue and green light.

Then in the back yard, guests entered Dev's science lab, complete with beakers full of glowing liquids, an analog computer, and an oscilloscope, and a real robot Dev built himself, along with an awesome wall of equations that Lilli drew for us.

On the patio, in the lit-up section of the yard, we also set up Dev's cabinet arcade game Space Duel, which was a big hit.

 

Dev as The Scientist

In the dark area we set up a bar with retro sci-fi posters framed in black-light-reactive tape, glow-in-the-dark stars, twinkling UFOs, and even a glowing, black-light-reactive punch Dev created for the occasion.  We hung four large black lights over the bar area.

Dev's glowing cocktail

For party favors we had glow sticks (we bought 300) and "atomic ray guns" - assorted retro-styled water guns.


The baskets glowed under black light.

 

Out on the lawn we projected a great compilation of old retro sci-fi movie trailers (1, 2, 3, and 4 - check them out, they are a lot of fun to watch).  We also had the trailers playing on the TV in the back room in case people wanted to head inside to warm up.

But the centerpiece was definitely the crashed UFO.

 

Lilli and I built the body of the UFO out of two beach umbrellas covered in sheets of aluminum foil, then ringed with LED rope lights.  The smaller round lights on top are LEDs tucked into glow-in-the-dark ping pong balls cut in half.  The capsule on top is a semi-translucent plastic serving bowl with two LED black light strobe lights inside.

Underneath the UFO Dev hid some speakers to play UFO sound effects, a strobe light, and our retrofitted fog machine*.  We also hid some more LEDs under the saucer to better illuminate the fog.

Dev testing out the fog machine

(The video below doesn't do a good job of capturing the sounds, but you can here them here: 1, 2, 3, 4).

Lilli spent the whole week ahead of the party visiting us and she was a tremendous help with everything from entertaining the kids to creating glow-in-the-dark hula hoop spheres.

James and Melissa also came by the night before the party and helped us program the UFO and spray paint bowls and baskets with black-light-reactive paint.

We had a slightly smaller turn-out this year (just under 80 adults and a few kids), but we also had some really great costumes.

Black light group shot

This is what everybody actually looked like.

Pink hair twins

 



Then after the last guest went home at around 3am, I went to bed already excited about the absolutely awesome ideas I have for Halloween 2015 . . .

* Inexpensive fog machines never look very good because a) they just make a thin puff of fog that immediately dissipates, and b) you have to manually push a button each time you want it to go off.  But by passing the "fog" through a cooler full of ice you can cool if off, resulting in thick, low, slow-rolling fog, then put it all on a timer, remote control, or motion sensor so you don't have to stand next to the machine all night to get it to operate.

William, Month Ten

Most of this month was taken up with the excitement of Halloween, but the other big news is that William is talking! A little. He remains a lot quieter than his brother was at the same age, but he did say his first word, "Dada," and shortly after, "Hi, Dada!" (Video to follow)

When I took William to his nine-month check-up last month, he was still not really vocalizing at all - he almost never made sounds like "goo" or "dada," instead only laughing or crying, and the doctor was a little concerned.  Then I took him over to play at his best friend Cylas's house.  Cylas is one month younger than William but very vocal.  They played together that afternoon and then that evening William suddenly starting baby talking constantly - I guess he just needed someone to show him how it was done.

 

Hanging out with Cylas

Other than talking, everything this month has been much the same as the last - William loves baby music class and library story time, is almost but not quite walking, and is eating any solid food he can chew.  His favorite food these days is probably cheese, which he loves both to eat and to feed to the dogs (even though he's not supposed to).  He also loves pumpkin pie (who doesn't?).  He now has six teeth, and at the pediatrician last month we discovered that unlike his siblings, who were both short and skinny at this age, he is skinny and tall (8th percentile weight, 67th height).

Hanging out with a lungfish at the zoo

Helping me with my shopping

His first time on a slide, with me and Arthur

A trip to Travel Town with his dad:

 

At the indoor playground with Arthur:

The best day of the week, Melodies and Me on Monday mornings:

 

Meanwhile he has been such a cheerful, happy baby, virtually never crying and sleeping through the night every night.  I remember commenting on this blog and elsewhere that William was more fussy and difficult than the other children, which I just chalked up to his personality - then I discovered the sad truth that he wasn't inherently fussy, he was just hungry due to a dip in my milk supply.  We switched to a diet of solid foods and formula and now he is at least as calm and pleasant as his siblings were, if not more so.

Playing with pumpkins on the porch

Now we're counting down to William's first Halloween - then on to more walking, talking, and soon his birthday!

Congratulations to Paul and Joanne!

 

One of my best friends just had a beautiful baby girl (and my goddaughter!) Esther Adelfa Henley! I can't wait to meet her!

Halloween Invitations 2014: It Lands!

I just finished distributing the last of this year's Halloween party invitations for our B-movie/retro sci-fi-themed party.

Inside the envelope is a little black box with a glowing green alien face.

 

We started with some black ring boxes which come with their own foam inserts. We took green LEDs, bent the contacts to the right size and shape, slipped in a 3V CR2032 battery, and tucked the LED inside the foam to diffuse the light.

 

 

The alien face was printed on two sheets - one transparency, one vellum - and stacked on top of the foam.  And then we used silver holographic paper to line the box lids.



Initially we designed the boxes so that opening the lid pulled a plastic tab that activated the LED - however, testing revealed that the LEDs actually stayed lit for almost a week on their own, so we just threw them in the mail already turned on.

 

The invitation itself is printed on a transparency sheet and then backed by metallic silver cardstock.

Since the invitations are small and don't provide a lot of room for information, they direct readers to the party website where I can add additional instructions, a map to my house, etc.

Here's a screen shot from the party website.

Meanwhile Dev and I have already started collecting supplies for the party itself - coming soon!

Monthly Activity Plans: September

Since Beatrice started kindergarten in August, I've been a little unhappy.  In most respects, I like her kindergarten - I think it's about as good a public school as you'll find - but when she left preschool I was expecting that kindergarten would be a big leap forward for her academically, a leap I knew she wanted and was ready to take.  But the truth is, so far kindergarten has probably been less challenging than preschool, and with fewer hands-on activities like experiments and projects. 

Now Beatrice is very good at creating her own projects, but I still felt like something was missing.

The solution I came up with was to start doing more short one-on-one activities with her in the afternoons while Arthur and William are napping (though sometimes Arthur joins in, too).  So I made up with a calendar of lessons to do every day - or realistically, most days, since sometimes other things come up instead.  We started doing these things last year but now I'm trying to do them in a somewhat more structured way.

MONDAY we do math.
TUESDAY we do computer programming.
WEDNESDAY we do science.
THURSDAY we do history and literature.
FRIDAY we do art.

So far some have worked better than others, but here's what we did in September:

For math we did money.  Arthur and Beatrice's favorite activity was the snack store.  Basically I set up little bowls of snacks that cost different amounts of money, from 1 cent to 2 dollars, and gave them each two dollars in coins and bills, and let them buy different snacks to eat.

For computers we started working with Scratch, this amazing programming language for kids - more on that soon.



Beatrice's first computer program

For science we did states of matter and some basic chemistry.  We did a couple of fun things with this one, including a solid/liquid/gas scavenger hunt and atom dancing (where they had to dance like atoms in a gas, liquid, or solid).

Atoms in a solid



Atoms in a gas

For history and literature, we did understanding maps and U.S. geography.  This was probably the one Beatrice liked the best because it was the most imaginative.  I had her draw maps of her favorite places, give directions on how to get to local places, and tell a story in map form.  We also did a game about understanding relative distances, like how long it would take to get to Pasadena versus Texas versus Alaska, and then we planned out trips to see different people and sites in the U.S., like how to drive from here to visit her cousins in Austin.

There are so many great resources online for these kinds of things, most intended for homeschoolers but useful for anyone.  There are also a few subjects for which I found almost nothing online, especially for genetics and evolution, so I might put up the worksheets I made in case anyone ever stumbles upon this blog and wants to use them.

Anyway, it's a work in progress but so far, so good.