Monday, November 3, 2014

I would, but it seems someone has broken our coffee maker...Violently

Halloween, I love this holiday.  It's one of my most favorites, but this year was definitely the most stressful.  Why?  My internship.
I'm in the Parks and Recreation department in HomeCity doing special events.  The biggest event of the year that Special Events puts on is Halloween.  I started at the end of August and that is all we have been talking about and working on.  Well except for one or two small events.
Well, Halloween came and went, obviously, and I think it turned out pretty well.
The purpose of the Halloween Carnival is to provide a safe, friendly, family event where kids can have more fun and get more stuff than from just Trick or Treating since it's getting more and more dangerous. It's hosted at the newly built rec center.
I'll try to describe everything, and I have pictures, lots of pictures =}
Let's start with what we call Trick-Or-Treat Street.  Between six of us (3 part time workers and 3 interns) we divided two rooms, or our boss did based on the same layout as last year.
Here is what the classroom looks like normally:



Looks kinda small huh?  That's how I felt too.  Anyway each of us came up with our own theme for our little section of our room.  It ended up being Ghost Busters, Space, the Flintstones, Tangled, The Lego Movie (hey that's my idea!), and Beauty and the Beast.
So we spent a lot of time making our own decorations.  I am now confident that I can probably make almost anything out of cardboard, boxes, hot glue, paper, and paint.  
This is how my section turned out:




This guy took forever.  It's the giant dog dome from Cloud Cuckoo Land 
 Here is what it looked like mostly finished.  The string of Christmas lights looked awesome lit up.  We got some more for behind Mr. Turtle there.

See how cool the lights looked?  I put a balloon arch in to be the rainbow they climb.


 Here is Wildstyle's costume. I was too busy the night of to get a picture of the volunteer and she left before the event was done ( by about ten minutes so it was okay).
I was so proud of Emmet's room too.

 A wonderful volunteer who stepped up at the last minute to be Emmet!
Here are some details from Emmet's room.


 I wish I would have gotten pictures of everyone else's areas, maybe I'll copy them from the work computer.... Anyway.
Along with Trick-Or-Treat Street we also had two gyms full of games.  I was over two of them along with The Lego Movie.
Angry Birds was a pretty easy game to plan for since it's been done in the past.  I just needed to get another shelf so we could have two lines going this year instead of one.  I also built the slingshots.


This is Brit, she is a fellow intern that was more than willing to help test it out, again and again.

The other game I was over was more tricky since it was a new space we were using and I had to come up with something.  I chose to do an obstacle course themed with How to Train Your Dragon.
The obstacle race would start with the two racers receiving one of these cute lambs they would have to carry through the course.  

 They then had to crawl through this stringy web to reach the other side.  (Most children just plowed through this part.  A few clotheslined themselves)

 Then they had to run around these dead trees.
And finally throw their lamb into one of these baskets.
I wish I would have had more decorations in this area but oh well.

I was also over the Humans vs. Zombies laser tag game.  I only have one picture from that:
It looked awesome thought because it was surrounded by black plastic so the sign jumped out at you.  
The inside wasn't that cool because we had to work around the indoor playground. just imagine a lot of black plastic to cover protective netting and caution tape and spiderwebs.

Here are a few more pictures of one of the gyms:

Here we have an Alice in Wonderland cake walk



 Here is minion toss

 Zombie Soccer!


 And Woody's round up

In the other gym there was a food eating contest, gypsies, a TMNT slide, Luigi's Ghost Mansion, and a giant operation game.  But I didn't go into that gym very often so I forgot pictures.
We also had a place where kids could meet Aurora and Maleficent; Katniss and Effie; Peter Pan and Tinker Bell; Spiderman; Glinda and Elphaba, and Mary Poppins.  
A magician and animal show was also there along with a craft room and a haunted house.  

I was all over the place most of the night because I was also in charge of volunteers.  It is one of the most stressful things I've had to be over.  We barely had enough volunteers to run the event.  And a lot that said they would come didn't.  No excuse or anything, just didn't show.  AHHHH!  That was how I felt for the first hour.  But it was all worked out in the end. 
Would I do it again?  Yes.  Would I do it differently?  Yes.  But that's the point is to grow and learn.

We had around 4000 people in attendance but it didn't feel packed, which is always nice.  So if you're around next year looking for a good place to spend Halloween, here you go.