Dress up and pumpkins

Well, the past two days have been exciting for the kiddos.  Saturday during the daytime, their grandmother came to visit (and wear them out).  They played hard and had a lot of fun.  After grandma went home, we pulled out the costumes for the kids to dress up.  

Three princesses and a duck.  Sounds like a good joke.

We headed over to Church at the Crossing for their fall fest.  This event has a wagon ride, food, games, blow up bounce houses, crafts and everyone's favorite.....Trunk or Treat!  Instead of heading from house to house, kids get to walk down rows of vehicles with their trunk opened up that are each decorated with a theme and trick or treat this way.  Lots of fun, and the candy to walking time ratio can't be beat.  I think the only time I have witnessed a better ratio was when we did trick or treating in my college dorm.


We headed down the row of vehicles first, since it was still light outside and the temperature was only dropping.  After working their cute charms to get as much loot as possible (somehow Lydia and Ian got the most) we headed inside for the activities there.


There were some games and musicians, but the memorable part was the kids maze.  It is constructed of many cardboard boxes about the size that pumpkins come in at the grocery store.  My three oldest ones entered at the same time, but only Caroline came out.  After waiting about 10 more minutes and seeing 20 kids exit that had entered after mine, we sent Caroline back in after the other two.  Right as she headed in, Lydia pops out.  I asked her where Ian was, and she gave me a blank stare.  So we waited another five minutes and right as I was getting ready to head in myself, out comes Caroline and Ian.  We asked him if he was just sitting in there, and he was like,"Yeah" (insert cute and sheepish grin).  I guess that he was having trouble crawling around and keeping his duck feet on.  We called it a night after this.

Caroline elbow deep while Ian picks up seeds he dropped.

Sunday brought about the annual carving of the pumpkin.  The kids have been begging me to do this for several days now, so I grabbed my knives and set up for the pumpkin carving.  I asked the kids how we should do it this year.  I feel that they have been thinking this through, because they immediately returned with,"Triangle eyes and a square nose".  Easy enough.  What about the mouth?  "Umm, it should have a scared mouth", Lydia responded with.  "Do you mean a scary mouth", I asked.  "Umm, yeah, a scared mouth".  Fangs it is.  The kids really like getting their hands inside of the thing and pulling out the seeds and goop.  Once the seeds are out, they just play with the goop until it is more like mush.  


They also wanted a bat on the side, which I didn't think I would want to carve a hole that big.  So I traced an outline and wanted to do more of a silhouette.  Well, as we all know, that kind of detail work is a little hard to do with a knife.  What should I use?

Carving with power tools.  That's how we Simpsons do it.

Dremel it is.  Nothing like the smell of burning pumpkin flesh and the spray of it's insides to get in the spirit.  Sounds kind of gory, but I think that is was fun.  The kids thought it was cool with me going at it with the rotary disc.  It didn't quite work how I wanted it to, but that was mostly because the pumpkin had some thick walls.  All in all a fun time.