Are you ready to enjoy Halloween with your children? Here are a few Halloween announcements and notes from our family.

Halloween at our house

Z will be dressing up this year as a fairy riding a unicorn. It's a part-handmade, part DIY hack costume that makes use of the horse from her ladybug-cowgirl costume two years back and may end up incorporating elements from her hippo-princess costume last year.

We put up our Halloween decorations last night. These are all internal, as we live outside town and won't see any trick-or-treaters at our place. That means indoor lights (red/orange/yellow LED bulbs and a string of skeleton lights) and the decoration of a small purple fake Christmas tree with homemade Halloween ornaments (it also gets pulled out for Mardi Gras). As we decorated the tree, Z proudly noted each of the ornaments she had made, and asked which of us had made each of the others.

Win something Halloweeny

We've rounded up dozens of Halloween giveaways on PRIZEY. Most are still live, and users are adding last-minute ones to a rolling list. Take a look.

Great kids' media for Halloween

Jenna points us to a few great Halloween kids' books in an early Mini Media Mogul.

We're loving the DVD edition of A Very Brave Witch, which Scholastic sent to us at our request. The reason we asked for it, actually, was that it included the 1978 animated version of Tomi Ungerer's The Three Robbers, which you can see, for the moment at least, right here:



The premise of A Very Brave Witch, if you aren't familiar with it from the book by Alison McGhee and Harry Bliss, is that a witch has to be very brave to encounter non-witchy humans and their non-witchy ways. You can still get the book or the DVD on Amazon in time for Halloween. Or, you can put on a performance of your own.

Chronicle Books also has a sale in their own store - 30% off Halloween books with free shipping, through October 31. (That's an affiliate link there - we've joined their affiliate program to offer advertising on our sites, because we like so many of the kids' books they put out.)

Stay safe

The Consumer Products Safety Commission has some tips on keeping your kids safe on Halloween.

We love Halloween as the first of a fun-filled holiday season for kids and adults. We want to know how you're spending it. What will your child be dressing up as this year? Any Halloween traditions or events you're particularly looking forward to?

Today's agenda is simple. Announcements, then candy.

1. It's unfortunate that the term "biweekly" is so confusing

Anyway, we are starting up three new columns on ZRecs blogs, each appearing at least every two weeks, confusing terminology be damned. They are:

ZRecs Family: Licensed marriage and family therapist Terry McNichols will discuss family relationships and answer reader questions in ZRecs Family, our new advice and relationships column at The Tranquil Parent. Terry will cover the dynamics of relationships with your spouse or partner, children, in-laws, and parents, and she's opening the floor to reader questions for possible discussion and response in Q&A-style posts. You can submit your questions as anonymously as you'd like using our handy submission form, or read her first topical post tomorrow while she waits to hear from you about challenges you face in your family relationships.

Mini Media Mogul: Author and blogger Jenna Glatzer rounds up books and music for kids twice a month on Punnybop. So far she's been doing four reviews per column, ranking them from best to worst. We likey. Today's post (her second in the series, here's the first) takes a listen to (and shares video/music clips from four kids' CDs. Even her daughter gets in on the action...

Ask ZRecs: We're going to start publishing this once-occasional column on a weekly basis, because we get a lot of questions from readers about kids' products and how they work. We may play with the format and scheduling of this a bit, but we'd like to be responding to your questions in a more formal and regular way, so we're renewing our commitment to getting this going. Watch as we feel our way through it.

2. Lolly lolly lolly get your adverbs here

We got a few requests for information about HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) free treats in the survey responses from this month's ZRecs Network newsletter, which went out yesterday (if you haven't opened it, take a peek in your inbox - you have until midnight tonight to enter to win a free superhero outfit for your child from Little Capers!). We have some interesting recommendations we'll collect for a future Tranquil Parent post, but we saw this deal on Amazon today and, what with Halloween right around the corner, we knew someone would be interested in it.

If you know you need some kind of candy on hand for Halloween but hate buying the junk you'll see when you run to the store in the days before Halloween, or if you are the habit of keeping a drawer in your kitchen perpetually stuffed with sweets, you should take a look at YummyEarth's organic lollipops, which are on sale for about 50% off ($15 for about 350 pops).

I have never eaten a YummyEarth lollipop, and would even posit that the brand name itself is kind of an oxymoron unless you suffer from pica. But the fact that Z has never seen a lollipop she didn't like, and that these particular lollipops are free of so many things it isn't even funny, and have some pretty amazing flavor names, and are really cheap at the moment (they may be a Deal of the Day) conspired to make me mention them. They are vegan (no gelatin), declared to be wholly free of all kinds of allergens, they are organic, and they do not contain high-fructose corn syrup. And the four-cents-apiece price tag for organic candy makes my heart sing. Check them out on Amazon.com. And if you're the nothing-beats-chocolate type, we encourage you to buy Fair Trade. Children just like yours will be better off for it.