Halloween (with the spooky filter on the iphone camera)

Hello out there, friends! It's been a long time.

October is totally my most favorite month of the year. Where I live in California we have seasons but they are on the subtle side - and so the way you really feel "fall" approaching is through the halloween decorations that begin to pop up on lawns and houses around us.

(I especially love the ghost my girls made and taped on our door. Scary!)

I find Halloween decor to be somewhat of a slippery slope. Years ago I began with the classy natural approach: a bare grapevine wreath, candy corns in a jar on the counter, blown-out eggs painted with semi-spooky Martha Stewart designs.

But soon pine cones and pumpkins no longer satisfied my who-knew-they-were-so-bloodthirsty children so I bought a tombstone for the lawn. The next thing you know we have an upsidown (presumably being tortured?) skeleton hanging from the limbs of a sweet little tree in the front yard and I find myself participating in a dinnertime conversation with the husband and children wondering if perhaps it might not be a good idea to make a pretend fire beneath the dangling skeleton.

What?!

But really, it's hard to compete when you have this across the street from you:

and this:

Yes, those are zombie BABIES behind the dismembered bloody man.

My friend Liz has I think found the perfect middle ground. Check out her flock of paper bats, flying across her family room:

Spooky and yet not something that would be forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Happy October!