Halloween Safety Tips for Families

The trick-or-treat festivities are just about upon us… and so is the weekend. Fright night or a Monday or a Wednesday, well, pretty chill. Saturday’s frightful activities might be a bit less tame than usual.

So, in the name of good, clean, spooky fun, here are some hot tips from the Comox Valley’s own Street Smart Kidz, [...]

OBE’s Good, Bad and Ugly Homemade Halloween Treats

Good Morning. I have never aspired to be a genius in the kitchen, which by all accounts of my hearty Polish upbringing is so very wrong. There are a few things where I claim master title status – baked meat is right up there. I am a cole slaw champ. Potatoes 12 ways is my [...]

Comox Valley 2009 Halloween Hot Spots

Editor’s Note: Halloween is just around the corner. Time to bust out the decor and get spooky. If you missed this morning’s post, check out our crafty version of Dia de los Muertos skulls HERE. Now, on to the important stuff, where’s the candy and costume parades. Here’s what’s happening this Halloween weekend in the [...]

Craft – Day of the Dead Skulls

I love Halloween. But, one of my favorite celebrations every year is the Mexican tradition of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), honoring our ancestors, heritage and the renewal of life.
This gorgeous celebration is one that we had the honor of participating in for years when we lived in California – learning the [...]

Get Spooked (and Win Gear) with Nadia G

Take a deep breath and steady your nerves, it’s time for Bitchin’ Kitchen’s official Halloween Treasure Hunt and Giveaway. You can win a copy of the Bitchin’ Kitchen cookbook, cursed by Nadia G herself, a DVD of the original Saw film that kicked-off the franchise, and Our Big Earth will throw in a surprise gift [...]

Bitchin’ Kitchen – Halloween Hootenanny

The Magic of Seasonal Festivals for Children

Editor’s Note: It’s an education imagination Saturday. If you missed it this morning, we reviewed two fantastically fun Halloween books with the Rainy Day Book Club. Check them out HERE.

This afternoon we have Rebecca Watkin discussing the Waldorf tradition of seasonal festivals – their significance, beauty and ability to make the imagination of childhood soar. [...]

Book Review – Not So Scary Monsters & Witches

Some kids love Christmas. Some love Easter. Mine, she L-O-V-E-S Halloween. I love the wawawahhhhhhhh coming from her when describing vampires and ghouls. But, really when you ask the tiny person what kind of stories she wants to read right now, the terms mildly spooky, a little mysterious and a lot funny are on the [...]

Spooky Crafts – Owl Luminara

Good Morning. Halloween is creeping up on us and here at OBE headquarters we have an annual tradition of coming up with something we can light on fire.
Pumpkins shmumpkins. Yeah, they’re totally fun to carve and we love our ghoulish globs of orange madness. But, there’s something super eerie and a bit fun about coming [...]

OBE Meets Pumpkin Patch

Good afternoon! If you missed the morning post, Wendy Johnstone offered some wonderful insight into aging with dignity. You can find her post HERE.
The Our Big Earth crew had a fantastic time collecting pumpkins, checking out the spooky barn and chasing chickens yesterday as we headed out to Shamrock Farms for the annual OBE Pumpkin [...]

Think Green for Halloween

Editor’s note: Today we have the fantastic and energetic Gayle Bates and the debut of her green education column. She’ll be here once a month to talk shop about how families can walk more gently on the Earth by reducing, reusing and recycling. Tips and tricks abound! Here she is:
Oh Halloween and the thrill of [...]

Register for OBE’s Annual Pumpkin Patch Party

Good morning. When it comes to Fall, our favorite family adventure is one that always involves the pumpkin patch.
While there really is all kinds of coolness in the orange farm field universe, we here at Our Big Earth have developed a soft spot in our heart for one Comox farm that puts some serious spooky [...]

“Stained Glass” Sun Catchers

As much as I insist on denying the loss of sunshine, it’s definitely Fall around these parts.
A few weeks ago, the tiny person and I took a look around a house filled with Summer craft projects.
We figured it was time to get going on something a bit more rustic, harvest-like and spooky – if you are [...]

Flying Bat Puppets

Ugh. One very sick monster decided to visit our house last night, passing by everyone else and gifting his goo to me and me alone. It is remarkable how unwell a person can feel in the span of a couple of hours. So, here I am at 8:30 a.m. still making my way through the [...]

Turn Your Halloween Green with Free Gear

If I was talking to our daughter, she’d be hoping I was bringing up the green chatter about the spooky monster costume her daddy is concocting for her this year. It’s between that and a spooky ghost. Somehow, if daddy is in charge, the green monster will definitely win.
The tiny person may think green monsters [...]

The Spooky Family Tree (& Free Craft Gear)

We have been gearing up for Halloween around here for a looooooong time. In fact, I’m quite serious when I say that I am nearly out of ideas for ghoulish holiday creations and am now going to have to dig in to come up with something of which the 3-year-old approves. Seeing that the daily [...]

Spooky Stories of Bones and Bunnies

In a little, tiny house on an everyday sort of street lived a little girl who loved monsters.
It seemed her destiny to dig those spooky ghouls, as her dad had adored them even longer than her, creating more than a few in his time, and they lived everywhere in that house – framed, in notebooks, [...]

Whooooo’s There – Paper Owl Door Decor

When I woke up this morning and realized this was the last time I’d ever post on Comox Valley Kids, I had one seriously weepy moment.
Tomorrow morning, most if not all of you will be redirected over to Ourbigearth.com and we will launch our new phase as Our Big Earth-Comox Valley.
I feel like I’m in [...]

Time to Hit the Pumpkin Patch

After waking up yesterday morning to freezing rain, my enthusiasm for taking 30 kiddos and their parents out to the pumpkin patch waned more than a little.

But, as usual, Mother Nature remembered there was one of our events going on at 12:30 p.m. So, the rain broke and we had a totally GORGEOUS afternoon out [...]

3D Pumpkins, Witches, Bats & Spookiness

So, I completely cop to loving Halloween.
Other holidays, they’re fun.
But Halloween, even minus the stat holiday, is hilarious and weird and creative and outrageous – which ranks it right up there in my bizarre book. Any chance to get dressed up…
While the candy is all well and good – and the pumpkins rock – I [...]

Register Today to Hit The Pumpkin Patch

Good morning!
The rumors are true – We have hooked readers up with Shamrock Farms and their giant pumpkin patch to do a little farm visiting and pumpkin picking.
We can take 30 kiddos and their parents on our Thursday, Oct. 9 tour of the farm, on Anderton Road just across from Watrin Orchard. The tour begins [...]

Shadow Lanterns with Repurposed Jars

The tiny person totally digs shadows these days.
She follows hers around, has lengthy conversations with them on the walk to library, thinks that our bedtime routine is nowhere near complete until a round of shadow making commences.
She’s also right into the whole spooky Halloween tale universe – insisting that Eve Bunting’s “Scary, Scary Halloween” and [...]

The Snack-O-Lantern

OK, so my guilt got the best of me (easy to do really). So, even though I attempted to skip out today, I decided to wow you with a super cool eco-minded idea from one of my very favourite family-friendly get-your-kiddos-outside sites Green Hour.
We carved five pumpkins this year. They kept showing up around our [...]

The Great Pumpkin Saves Kids from Sugar Overload

A while back, I discovered The Tale of the Great Pumpkin.
I heard it in conversation. I read it on website after website, this spookytacular tale of bribing the kiddos out of their candy.
I am convinced that one brilliant parent out there came up with this remarkably savvy tool for reducing the sugar buzz factor around [...]

Halloween Spookytacular – Fright Night Events

We were so stoked.
The tiny person had put in a request, nearly every hour, for more than a week, to be a spider for Halloween.
Not being the creative one in the family, I wondered where the heck I could buy a spider costume. My husband the artist, on the other hand, was all about making [...]

Book Review – Monstrology 101

Welcome to the first edition of the CVK Rainy-Day Book Club.
A while back, in the midst of pulling together portions of our Rainy-Day Survival Guide, I was out cruising local book stores and ran into a pal who said that she’d stopped reading with her young kiddos because she had no idea how to find [...]

Making Bats for Spooky Learning

When I sent away for the Canadian Wildlife Federation’s free Wild About Bats package a few months ago, I sincerely wondered what I would ever do with it.
The tiny person was not in any way interested in flying spooky creatures at that point and, much like the snake one I also sent away for, the [...]

Halloween Spookytacular – Taking A Break

We have a mantra around this house – When the sun is out, so are we.
It’s especially true as the gray of the rainy season starts to set in. I begin each day this time of year with a check of the skyline from our back deck to see if the sun is peeking out [...]

Pumped Up Pumpkin Carving

Pumpkin carving is one of THE great family rituals around here.
Me, I’m the pumpkin patch lover. In my estimation, there is nothing as fun as an afternoon running around the farm, picking out the perfect pumpkin and soaking up that harvest energy.
My husband is the pumpkin carving master, the maestro of glowing squash, the king [...]