Halloween 2021 was hard. And when I say “hard” I mean “extremely hard”. Our second baby had just arrived and he was only 1 month old. Our daughter was already a 1 year and 5 months old toddler, we had no help that day and everything was “one small tornado”, as we like to say. The baby was crying and I had to breastfeed him every 1-2 hours, the toddler was all over the place knocking down my decorations, filled cups and glasses, biting the chocolate muffins when nobody was watching and crying for attention when we were doing anything other than staring at her.

Somehow I managed to find 20 minutes to prepare some Halloween muffins. Thank goodness for ready-made muffin mixtures from Lidl! I just added an egg, a bit of sugar and baked everything. Icing was also from a ready mixture and took me 3 minutes to make. I also baked some pumpkin with sugar and cinnamon, which is my Halloween tradition at this point (also, the one thing I love the most for eating during Autumns).

We were waiting for our guests to arrive later that evening. Yes, we had a baby and a toddler and I still went for the full clean-the-house, prepare-food, get-decorations-up, waiting-for-guests, clean-after-them-again type of big Halloween celebration. What can I say, I am a very sociable person and I do like me some guests and partying!

We even found time to carve one huge pumpkin, which we used as a lantern throughout the evening.

We did put up all of our decorations that we had for every Halloween celebration at our house, I prepared the table and our lovely guests started arriving.

We played my all time favorite “Kiss, marry, kill” game, but unlike last Halloween, when I just had a note of names on my phone, this year I decided to level up the game. I spent a couple of hours on Photoshop to create these collages of celebs to use for the game. So when my guests arrived, we turned off the lights in the room, left only the candle in the Jack’o’lantern, I played my collages on the smart TV and we started playing. It was absolutely magical – everyone was laughing and enjoying their time, the pictures were changing, we were eating muffins and drinking wine, it was great! The baby was asleep most of the time and the toddler enjoyed the company of our guests and behaved pretty well.

This year we went for easy costumes that required almost no preparation, because of obvious reasons. I took out a gorgeous pink dress that I had, did a bit of makeup and used a venetian mask that I bought from the carnival store. My husband just put on some sports clothes and said he was dressed as “a football fan” ha-ha, and for our lovely daughter I bought a tiny cowboy vest from the supermarket nearby, so she was an improvised cowgirl.

We had a lot of fun, despite the circumstances.

Happy Halloween!