Tips for burned out moms: Halloween edition

Boo! Halloween is coming, and here are some useful tips to help you get ready without much effort.

Make your own spiders with pompoms and pipe cleaners that you can then use to make a crazy hairstyle or Halloween puppets

A super useful craft: Pompom Spiders

Save time by doing a quick and creative activity with your little one that you can also use for something fun. Halloween hairstyle with DIY spiders! You’ll only need a few materials like pompoms, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, glue, and hair clips or pins.

Make the spider’s body using two pompoms, and cut the pipe cleaners to create the legs. Once your spider is ready, glue it to a hair clip. Style your child’s hair in a messy look and add the little spiders. You can also create spiderwebs with strands of hair or use plastic webs to complement the look, even hanging a spider from a string. It could also make a great costume—just dress your child in black, add plastic webs, and stick on as many spiders as you want.

You can also attach the spiders to a stick to make mini spider puppets. Your little one will love playing with them!

Chocolate spider cupcakes are a perfect snack, dessert or lunch for this time of year

A spooky and delicious recipe: Spider Cupcakes

You can make this recipe as simple or as fancy as you want. I made chocolate chip cupcakes with box mix, just adding oatmeal, an extra egg, and Greek yogurt to make them a bit healthier (you can also add mashed bananas or blueberries for extra fiber).

Once the mix is ready, bake them in cupcake liners. When they’re done, simply stick on some googly eyes and pipe cleaners for the legs. You can use candies or chocolate chips to make the mouth or extra eyes. I skipped the frosting, but you can add it to yours. These are perfect as a snack, dessert, or even a fun lunchbox treat for this time of year.

On Halloween, when the children go to your house to ask for sweets, surprise them with some popsicles disguised as ghosts or pumpkins

Ideas for Halloween candy:

Trick-or-treating is the best part of Halloween, and a little extra effort makes it even more special. You don’t need to give out a lot of candy; a small detail will do. For example, lollipop costumes. All you need is some paper and a ribbon or reused string. Draw eyes and a mouth to make a ghost, or use orange paper and a green ribbon to create a pumpkin (I didn’t have orange paper, so I made my pumpkin lollipop with white paper 😬).

Ideas of alternatives to give instead of sweets on Halloween

Other alternatives to candy…

Every year, kids end up with way more candy than they can eat after Halloween, so giving a small toy or trinket instead is not a bad idea. Nowadays, you can find packs with hundreds of small items for a similar or even lower price than a candy bag. For instance, you could hand out a small toy, a keychain, a stamp, an eraser, or a Halloween-themed pencil or marker instead of candy. It can be a fun change!

Halloween has become an increasingly popular celebration, and for good reason! Coming up with a costume and going trick-or-treating is exciting. Don’t forget to add your own touch with simple ideas that can make the season even more magical for your little ones. And don’t forget your costume—join the fun and treat yourself to a piece of candy too :)