To help you figure out a creative, original and adorable costume for your baby this halloween, I’ve come up with several ideas to share:

1. Baby Pumpkin Costume: This is so easy to make. Buy a tiny orange sweatshirt, black and green felt, orange or green hat and orange pants. To make the jack-o’-lantern face, cut out three black triangles to make the eyes and nose. For the mouth, cut out a crescent shape. Attach them with needle and thread in a few places or, if you prefer, sew all the way around. I don’t sew and even I can do it. =-) Cut out the green felt in the shape of leaves. Take the little hat you’ve bought, and attach your green felt leaves to it. Voila, you’re done!

2. Baby Black Cat Costume: Another easy costume you can make! You’ll need a black sweatshirt, black or leopard-print toddler pants, eye liner, yarn of any color, and a headband with little ears. Attach the yarn to the pants with a safety pin to make a tail. Use the eye liner to draw whiskers on your child’s face. You’re done!

3. Cute Baby Tomato Costume: For this costume, you’ll need a red sweatshirt, a red hat of some kind — it could be a baseball hat or a simple cloth hat without a brim — green felt and red pants. As with the pumpkin costume, you’ll need to cut leaves out of the felt and attach them to the hat. If you wish, you can use some of the felt to make eyes on the sweat shirt.

Cornhole is similar to horseshoes or skee ball. You use a wooden platform or box that has a hole in it. You stand at a distance and try to throw bean bags into the hole on the platform. A bag that lands on the platform scores 1 point and a bag that lands in the hole scores 3 points. Players take turns throwing their bean bags (corn bags) until someone reaches a score of 21 points.

The beauty of this game with kids (though the adults had just as much fun and dominated the sets available at this particular party) is that it is simple, you can adjust the difficulty by just adjusting your distance from the platform, and you can adjust the winning score (say make it 10 instead of 21) so the game lasts as long as you want it to.

You do need a game set to play. The prices can be high (some tournament cornhole people take their game very seriously), but there are mini sets you can get for less.

I happened upon this free craft idea while at a friend’s house. While our children were playing, my friend brought out an arts and crafts box. Inside the box were paints, scissors, paper, old magazines, glue, glitter glue, markers and crayons. Those items right there can keep your toddler busy for quite some time.

When the toddlers said they wanted to paint, we took them over to the tiled area of the house and let them have paper and fingerpaints. Pretty soon, one toddler wanted to paint her legs. That did not bother us, so we let her. Pretty soon, the seocnd toddler wanted to paint her legs and take her clothes off.

Not long after, both children had their clothes off and were happily painting their bellies and giggling. They would paint their belly button, giggle and then shout, “look at me!”

They giggled at the ticklish paint brush and went wild at the attention they got from the other three of us.

At the end, we put both toddlers into the bath and the fun continued as they rubbed slippery soap over the painted parts, splashed in the water and played with toys.

Oh, we got a few paintings out of this, too. One toddler made a ‘belly painting’ by placing her painted belly onto the paper.

My most recent “menu” for my son’d 4th birthday was easy and a hit.

• Pizza: We ordered pizza from a local favorite pizzaria.
• Fresh fruit salad: You can buy what is in season and on sale to keep cost down. You can also choose to cut it up your self or buy the pre-existing fruit trays that are usually available at the grocery store. Be sure to that fruit pieces are cut small enough and cut grapes in half to prevent choking hazard.
• Munchies: We had pretzels and corn chips.
• Mixed Salad: Make this at the last minute. We assembled fresh spinach, gorgonzola cheese, cranberries, sliced almonds, and red onion and offered a couple of dressings.
• Drinks: Bottled water, assorted sodas, box juices and capri sun’s kept everyone happy.
• Store bought birthday cake.

Other good options for the main entree (instead of pizza) are sandwich trays which you can get at the grocery deli, subway or other sandwich spots. Also, Costco and stores like it have tons a great prepared food and can provide inspiration if you just go and look around. We had some success for a different party with some frozen lasagnas that you can heat and serve. (Be sure to check cooking time before the day of the party to make sure you have it ready in time.)

Mini-Sized Foods and Portions

Kids love to see foods designed for their size and the portion control avoids waste. Mini pizzas (like bagel bites), baby carrots, mini muffins, and tea size sandwiches can be fun.

Depending on your time available and the number of guests, home made invitations are a nice, personal touch. Even if you can’t go fully home made, a few options follow for adding a more personal feel to the invites:

• Simply buy your standard party invite and have your child add a simple drawing, or even just paste some appropriately party themed stickers to the invite.
• Choose a photo of your kiddo to include in the invite. This works best when you can tie it into the theme of the party. (A photo of him or her in the pool for a pool party, for example. Or wearing a costume related to the party theme.)

Online Only Invitations

In todays digital age, online is often the way to go for kid’s party invitations. You and your child can have some fun together choosing the design and creating the online invite.

• Evite, http://www.evite.com – offers many party invitations you can create quickly online and email to your invite list.
• Send-O-Matic, http://www.sendomatic.com/

Create Online, Print at Home Invitations

• My Card Maker: http://www.mycardmaker.com/
• Invitation Land: http://www.invitationland.com/
• Pingg: http://www.pingg.com/

Required:
4 small plastic drinking cups
4-6 golf balls

If you’re a regular golfer, or have one in the family, this is a good way to use old balls.

Place one of the cups on the floor with the open side facing you. Divide the golf balls evenly between the two people. Each person attempts to roll the golf ball into the cup. Each time, you get the ball into a cup, you get one point. You may choose to play without points, and that’s fine, too.

When you’ve rolled all of the balls, you repeat the process until you play to ten or to another number of your choosing.

Materials

• Clear soda bottle with cap – empty, clean and dry.
• Rice, pasta or uncooked popcorn kernels.
• Non-toxic glue.

Directions

1. Make sure the plastic bottle you are using is clean and dry.
2. Place the rice, pasta or corn in the bottle.
3. Glue the top on.

That’s it! Voila! Inexpensive toy you can make in five minutes with items you probably already have in your home.

* Sheet Fort: When changing bed sheets – why not give the little ones the opportunity to make forts with sheets and the living room couch before throwing the sheets in for a wash? It can keep them occupied while you get other things done, and you don’t have to dirty a clean sheet for the occasion.

*Sheet Sled: Open up a sheet on the floor, plant your little one in the middle and pull them around for a fun ride before washing the sheets. The kids think its a blast and you might as well do it with the sheets you are about to wash anyway!

Loading & unloading

* Washer basketball: Its amazing how happy my son is to load the laundry into the washer or dryer for me. Its easier with the front loaders, but they can also “play basketball” with the top loaders. Make a game and yell “score!” or “2 points” every time they “make a basket.” (I also use this technique to get my son involved in picking up his toys in the playroom and putting them away in their baskets. It works wonders.)

Folding

* Admittedly, this is a tough one. I usually have work to keep my boys from messing up my neatly folded piles of clothes. They way I have dealt with this is to give them the kitchen towels and smaller bath towels to fold. They do their messy folding and I praise them, and they are happy. Then I re-fold them when they are not around. :~)

You probably want to continue doing toddler crafts with your little one, but maybe you’re getting tired of picking up crayons and markers from every corner of your home.

Well, I found these neat crayon rolls at Pink Taffy Designs.

They come in all kinds of patterns and colors. What they have in common is how convenient they are and how easy it’ll be for your toddler to help put away their crayons!

If you prefer a do-it-yourself option, there’s always the crayon shoe box to help keep kids crafts manageable.

LazyTown: This is a game that involves physical movement. When a card is selected, it often requires jumping, kicking from side or site or moving in a circle. Sometimes, my toddler says “I’m tired!” after this game.

PBS/Kids: This highly respected site provides online games for the preschool set. We’ve played alphabet games that taught my toddler the upper and lower case letters while having fun.

Joe’s Maze Game: In this game, your toddler can help the Joe find his broccoli. This is especially good for older toddlers who are learning to use the mouse.