Mary Poppins Costumes for the Whole Family 

We are a family that does celebrate Halloween, but I’m not into encouraging my kids dress up like spawns of Satan just for some free candy.

We go for the more gentle, family-friendly costumes around here. In the past we have done a bumble bee, a lady bug, a monkey, a mermaid, a dinosaur, Nemo (the fish), and Dopey (of the Sven Dwarfs).

This year I wanted to do a common theme for all my kiddos and I came across a lot of really cute ideas on Pinterest.  By far my favorite for a group of three was this adorable idea for Mary Poppins costumes from Make It and Love It. (Those are home-sewn and she has tutorials for all of them!)
I had plans to use her tutorials to sew the kids’ costumes myself, but since we are in the middle of moving right now, all of my sewing stuff is packed away in storage.

I decided to go the traditional Mary Poppins route with the coat, hat, and umbrella instead. I love that this will keep my daughter nice and warm. Last year it was snowing here in PA on Halloween and she had to wear a turtleneck, hat, and gloves with her mermaid costume, which was not quite the look we were going for.

Mary Poppins {no sew}

  
Abby’s was the most complicated to piece together, but was still super easy once I found a hat that could work. The coat is a hand-me-down from an older cousin, but I bet you could find a nice dress coat at a thrift store or kid’s consignment store this time of year too.

The hat was originally a foam cowboy hat from the dollar store. I cut off the brim, turned the hat sideways, and added ribbon and a flower. (I used a glue stick to add the ribbon and just poked the flower through since the hat is made of foam)  Everything that I used for the hat came from the Dollar Tree. I bought the kid-sized umbrella there as well.

The bow/scarf is a fabric gift wrap bow that was on clearance at Target and the wig came from their Halloween section.

If I had my craft stuff available, I might also crochet her a scarf, but we’re calling this good enough for now.

Bert {no sew}

 

Nicholas will be trick or treating as Bert, the chimney sweep. He still needs a suit jacket (or I might just tuck in the hood of a dark sweatshirt jacket he already has). His shirt is from the dollar store and he already had those pants. The hat and broom are from Target. I also bought $1 black Halloween makeup at Target to dirty him up for the occasion. 

Penguin{no sew}

I know it’s from an entirely different part of the movie and might not make as much sense as a group now, but I still liked the idea of having the baby be a penguin. Plus this might be the easiest DIY costume of all time. 

It’s just a hat from the kids section at Target, a white onesie, and 2 pairs of tights.

I didn’t even have to cut the tights or anything. The pair on her legs is her regular size and the pair on her arms is 2 sizes too big. I stretched them out and put them on her like a shrug. The way she is sitting in the picture makes it look like her arms are pulled back, but I promise she still has free range of motion and she seemed perfectly comfortable. I might cut off the elastic top of that pair before Halloween just to be sure, though.

My favorite part of this costume is that every single piece can go right into her regular wardrobe. I hate shelling out a ton of money for Halloween costumes every year. When you have several kids it’s really easy for the costume budget to go sky high really quickly.

If your family celebrates Halloween, what are your costumes ideas this year?

Thanks for visiting the blog! I really appreciate all of your comments, pins, and shares. 

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It’s official. Our house is on the market. (And if you want to buy it please email me and I will put you in touch with our realtor straight away!)

It’s a little bittersweet. We always knew that this wasn’t our forever house. It’s been a great house, but it was VERY dated when we bought it and we always wanted to own several acres of land. This house has a nice lot, about 1/3 of an acre, but we still wanted more space. Having a master bathroom wouldn’t hurt either.

This house has been good to us, though. This is where we brought both of the girls home from the hospital. It’s where we’ve had birthday parties and Gotcha Days and it’s where I became a stay at home mom. It’s also only a block or so away from a park, and in a good school district. Funny enough, one of the main reasons I fell in love with this house was because there are sidewalks on both sides of the street (surprisingly hard to find around here) and a big driveway. I really do appreciate being able to let the kids ride their bikes or push the stroller around the block and not have to worry about their safety. I remember that I kept saying to the realtor, “We can fix ugly, but sidewalks are a must. And no double yellow lines on the road.”  Also, the windows, roof, furnace, and hot water heater have all been replaced within the last 8 years.   

Even though it was dated when we bought it, we’ve been able to update quite a bit over the last 3 (almost 4!) years. Hopefully another family will like the back yard, large room sizes, and great closet and storage space as much as we have.

It’s a split-foyer house, so when you walk in the front door, you see these stairs. 

If you go up the stairs you come right into the living room.

Since we’ve lived here, in this room we exposed the hardwood floors, painted, added crown molding, replaced the trim around the windows, installed new doors & shelves in the coat closet, put a new light fixture in the entry, and Eddie & his dad replaced an old metal railing with these built-in shelves.  (We also exposed the wood steps, and replaced the floor in the foyer.)

On the other side of the wall where  our couch sits is our kitchen, which is finally FINISHED! (It only took 3 years) Literally everything in this room except the ceiling has been replaced. We replaced the cabinets, counters, appliances (all of which will be staying with the house), moldings, back splash, lighting, pantry door, paint, floor, and brought the electrical stuff up to code. 

The kitchen stretches into the dining room, making one large space.

In this room we redid the floor, added the molding, and painted. 
 
 
The sliding glass door in the dining room is how you access the back yard. There’s a small concrete patio at the bottom of a small stair case and then…

Our back yard has been by far one of our favorite parts of living in this house.

There is a hallway off of the dining room that leads to our main bathroom and 3 bedrooms.

This next picture is a blog exclusive. You won’t be seeing this in the mls listing. It’s my least favorite room in the entire house, but it has served us well.

We haven’t really done anything to update this room and sadly, it shows. The floor is not dirty, it’s just over 40 years old and worn out.  You can’t really tell from the picture, but it’s actually a pretty decent sized bathroom considering the age of the house. Hopefully the next owners will be able to update it because it has a lot of potential. We need to de-clutter this room now that we’re selling, but it’s hard when 5 people share 1 full bathroom and some of them are still potty training!

 

Nick’s room is across the hall from the bathroom. If it takes a while to sell the house, we will repaint it a more neutral color, but for now we figured the kids had enough change to deal with and we left their rooms alone.

The master bedroom is on the right. The only thing that designates it the master is that the closet is bigger. It’s not a walk-in, but is does extend almost the entire length of the wall, so we were pleasantly surprised to discover that it actually holds more than the smallish walk-in we had in our last house.

The only updates we’ve made in the bedrooms are paint, light fixtures, and a closet system in the girl’s room.  (Also, note to self: You have horrible taste when you are pregnant. Stop buying ugly grandma curtains and bright yellow paint.)  

If you go downstairs, there is a door directly at the bottom of the steps that leads to a very large unfinished storage room. (The same size as our kitchen & dining room area) That’s where our laundry, furnace, and water heater are.

If you stop at the bottom of the stairs and turn left, you’ll find our family room. We’ve been using this as our homeschool room since Nick started kindergarten.

We’ve tried to update this space a little by painting the paneling and replacing the baseboard. The brown shag carpet wouldn’t have been my first choice (or 2nd, or 3rd…) but it is in really good condition and comfortable for the kids to play on, so we kept it.

There is also a large storage closet and crawl space off of this room.

If you turn right at the bottom of the steps, there is a small foyer and powder room. There is also access to the garage in this area.

The powder room is another area where we replaced everything except the ceiling. 

 Uh, yeah. I don’t know why we bought it either looking like that, but we did. Hopefully there will be a new family coming along soon who will be blessed by all of the hardwork, sweat and tears that went into this house.

Wish us luck!  

What better way to follow up my most embarrassing stories then with another family classic? This one is about my grandfather. I’m running out of my own stories since I can only publicly humiliate myself so many times.

This is one of my absolute favorite family stories:

My grandfather

My grandfather was a pretty awesome dude. He was an Army veteran, a professional baseball player, and a police officer.  He never liked to talk about his service in World War II, but he was a war hero. He stormed the beaches at Normandy (June 6, D-Day, happened to be on his birthday) and received a battlefield commission at Remagen Bridge. He played an important role in liberating Germany. When he came home he was a baseball player for a few years before becoming a police officer who busted illegal bootlegging operations. How many cool careers can one guy have in a lifetime? Seriously, if they made a movie about it, people would think the coolness of his character was too far-fetched.

He passed away when I was 14. He never talked about the war or his time as a drug and alcohol buster-upper with me, as those topics were not appropriate for little girls. What he did like talking about was his baseball stories. He had tons of stories, but this one was my favorite:

For a few summers he was playing for the minor league team in Elmira, New York. My grandmother and their two young girls (my aunts, my dad wasn’t born yet) would stay in Elmira with him during the playing season and they would rent an upstairs apartment from an elderly woman in town. The elderly woman lived downstairs. During the off season they lived in Baltimore to be close to family.

The year my Aunt Cathi was a newborn, my grandfather had an away game and while he was gone the elderly lady offered to switch apartments with my grandma. These were the days before air conditioning and the downstairs apartment was cooler for the baby, plus then the young mom wouldn’t have to worry about getting two small kids up and down all the steps.

These were also the days before cell phones and the team was traveling by bus, so there was no way for them to notify my grandfather. They couldn’t very well have a letter delivered to a traveling bus.

You know where this is going.

He came home late one night after everyone was asleep. They weren’t expecting him until the next day. He was trying to be as quiet as possible so he didn’t wake up the baby. He went upstairs, in the dark (again trying not to wake the kids) and undressed thinking he was climbing into bed with the wife he hadn’t seen for a while. Ahem.

Instead he was met with the screams of his elderly land lady.

When Poppop told he story he would always reenact the way he jumped out of bed, yelled, “PARDON ME, MADAM!” grabbed his clothes, and got out of there as fast as he could.

And that is why, to this day, I like to say “Pardon me, Madam!” to break the tension in awkward situations. 🙂