Trick or Treat and UN Concert

I have shared some of these pictures on Facebook yesterday and today, but wanted to blog them too.

Yesterday was Halloween and one of the Mum's from Maddison's class and I decided to trick or treat the kids :-)  So I spent most of the day on Tuesday baking gingerbread men ... they were going to be "gingerdead" cookies (see here for picture of that), but after about 10 attempts trying to get the cookie cutter working and only one success (large cookie in the photo below) I gave up and just made regular gingerbread men.  I've used the cutter in New Zealand without any problems, but here it was hopeless, even freezing the dough didn't help.  It's just too humid.

Tuesday night I iced them ... there were about 120 or so!

Close up of my scary mummy cookies!  :-)

On Wednesday Aaron took a bunch of them individually wrapped for his class mates and teachers.

Samuel had dress up day so he went off growling like a pirate hehee

And in the afternoon I turned into a wolf ...

and scared Little Red Riding Hood!  ;-)

Little Red Riding Hood went into class first (we had another Mum already in class with the video that's why no pictures of what actually happened!) and then I went in dressed as the wolf.  The kids were really scared to start with and I didn't advance too far into the room because I didn't want to cause too much mayhem!  Little Red Riding Hood got them to help her shoo the wolf out though and he disappeared and turned into a witch instead!  ;-)

The nose got a bit hot though, so had to leave it hanging round my neck!

Kids enjoyed the cookies!  I took 40 to class and only had 3 left at the finish!!  

Great fun :-)

Today the kids elementary school had a United Nations Assembly and 14 different countries took part in doing a performance that was related to their home country.  This year there are quite a few "kiwis" at the school, so it was quite fun watching the kids practice (or not!) in preparation for today.  One of the Mum's got the ribbon sent over from NZ and we had dresses and "skirts" made here for the kids.  My Mum bought and made enough headbands for everyone (thanks Mum) and someones whanau back in NZ made pois for the girls and sent them over :-)

We had a last minute practice at 8am (I won't tell you how hard it was to get 3 kids plus myself out the door in time to ensure we got a park at school before then!!!).  But we made it ... phew!

Maddison's class had all made flag hats to wear too :-)

Waiting for their turn to perform (all lost in their own little world hehee).

I was videoing the performance and had Samuel on my knee, he decided he wanted to stay with me rather than go with Aaron.  So I found it hard to take photos with him there, the video in one hand, and man-handle my big DSLR with the other hand.  The only photo I managed of Maddison performing was blurry, but I took this one later outside and it shows her twirling her pois :-)

Amazed that I managed to catch this shot of Aaron with his tongue poking out, because it's not out for very long at all on the video!  My little pale face Maori was so cute up there with the big boys doing the haka :-)  So proud of them both for getting up in front of everyone without succumbing to stage fright!

Fun morning :-)  and if anyone has the need of a Maori headband let me know ... I have some spares hehee ;-)

Thanks for visiting.