Halloween 2009

Here's our little Hokie Bird in the costume I've been busy making the whole month of October. I've only made a few blankets before, so this required some extra help from my mother-in-law. I learned a lot, but I think I'll stick to blankets. Clothing is tough to sew! Not to mention I was modifying a dinosaur pattern to be the Hokie Bird. We had a lot of rain before trick-or-treating, so the ground was wet, nasty, and even had some mud puddles, which was not good for his big orange feet, but I soaked and scrubbed those today since the felt on the costume (for the feathers and tail) makes it dry clean only. I was amazed that people actually knew who he was, which might have helped because of Mykenzi's costume, but every house we went to and people we saw on the street knew who he was and thought his costume was cool! Only one older lady had trouble, and she asked if he was a scuba diver, but she also mentioned she didn't have her glasses on!

Had to show you the tail!

Is she seriously this big now? I just can't believe how beautiful Mykenzi is, and how awesome she looked in her VT cheerleader outfit. She really loved it! She chanted out of the house, into my studio for pictures, then back out to van, the whole time we heard, "let's go....hokies, let's go....hokies!" Too sweet!

We also further confirmed our suspicions that Mykenzi has a latex or adhesive allergy. We do have the lab order to get her blood work done to check for the latex allergy, which we really need to do this week. At the end of the night, I was taking the Hokie Bird off her face, and everything seemed to be fine, then a few minutes later she came and told me her face was burning. I looked, and there was basically a red imprint of the Hokie Bird on her cheek. We immediately thought about her last reactions to regular band-aids (skin turned red, puffed up, bumpy/blistery), and jumped on the internet to see if the temporary tattoo contained latex. Sure enough, there it is on their website, if you have a latex or adhesive allergy, then you should not use Gameface tattoos. That is not written any where on the package of tattoos, but it is on the VT sticker (surprised that that was just a sticker and not a tattoo) package that it is made of hypoallergenic material. We definitely need to be more careful about these things, but when I researched all things made with latex, temporary tattoos never came up, and we do our best to keep all latex containing items from her (which means no more latex balloons). The big concern for us is that latex allergies are typically developed by people who have had repeated contact with latex containing products (for example, people who have had multiple surgeries and health care workers), so if she's showing signs of having mild reactions to latex now, then if we ignore the possibility of an allergy and continue to expose her to latex, the allergy could become more serious.

Check out our pumpkins. Jonmark, Mykenzi, and Camden all picked out the faces.

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We hope you all had a Happy Halloween! We're looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas now!