Halloween Decorating on a Budget: Our Toddler Decorates the House
Like many of you, Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. I've always loved decorating, and have found myself doing so earlier and earlier every single year. My son Princeton caught the Halloween bug shortly after his second Halloween. Ever since, we discuss his ever-changing Halloween costume choices daily. Sometimes, several times a day.
He has more costumes than he's had Halloweens, and he likes to dress up a few times a day. His current favorite is Spider Man. He has three, count em', three different Spider Man Costumes, and will sometimes change from one to the other in the course of an hour. Princeton even gets Skyler dressed in costumes that no longer fit him.
Ah yes, it's Halloween year-round at our house.
This year, hubby and I decided to let Princeton do all of the decorating in our house. We have a ton of beautiful and pricey Halloween decorations that we have collected throughout the years, but we decided that this year is all about out tiny Halloween fanatic. We let him look through the decorations that we own, to decide which of those would fit his theme. But we also took him shopping to give him that sense of pride in being able to decorate his house like a big boy.
Of course, we did not want to spend our life savings on decorations that will probably be boring to him next year, so we did what any financially responsible parent would do; we went to the Dollar store.
We did not go in with a plan, but it turns out Princeton loves skulls and skeletons. So this year, our home is decorated with lots of skeletons... even a bird skeleton.
We gave our son a sense of responsibility and pride, we had a great time picking out all of the awesome and spooky decorations, and we had a blast decorating (in one hundred degree weather... in August... Yes, we started decorating in August). All this, for under twenty five dollars!
The "Beware Skull" sign and the Skeleton Hand were each just $0.99.
We got three of these smaller "Skull" and "Trick or Treat Pumpkin" fences for $0.99 each
We got the little pumpkin on a stick for $0.99 at the 99 Cent Only Store, but saw it at Michael's for $5.99. I love a deal!
The bigger fences that are up against the wall were $1.99 each, and we purchased five of them.
This skeleton bird in a cage was only $1.99, and hangs from a lantern above our doorbell.
This faux candle lantern looks amazing when it's lit, only cost $1.99, and sits in our entry, along with another special touch; dead flowers that were picked for me by Princeton himself.
We hung this $0.99 bat from the chandelier hanging over out dining table.
His first two decorations were put up mid-August. He was fascinated by the bat skeleton and wears the black skeleton mask from time to time. As I said, he loves dressing up for Halloween. The mask and bat skeleton were $0.99 each.
Finally, this lovely mask was hand-picked and purchased just for mommy. $0.99
The beauty of all of this is, we get to throw away most of these things at the end of the season, and they will not be taking up more storage space the rest of the year. But the absolute best thing about letting Princeton pick his own decorations and do most of the decorating is that he feels a sense of accomplishment and pride in the fact that his parents trusted him to do something very special to his house.
