some halloween stuff

Last week, Duncan really wanted to make a scarecrow. So I helped him find some pants and a shirt, and got him stuffing those with newspaper. I stapled the leg and hand holes shut to keep the paper in. Then we stapled the shirt to the pants. Next we stuffed a plastic grocery bag with newspaper and formed that into a head. Duncan drew a face, and we added a beany hat to finish him off.

Here's what it looked like.



Monday, when the boys got home from school, Anna dressed them in some costumes to wear while they did their homework. The costumes were in our Halloween storage boxes that we finally opened up that day. The hats didn't stay on long.

Last night we did our pumpkin carving. Here we are, all set up and ready to go. I thought there was a "middle" of our carving night, but nope, there's not.

Here are the finished jack-o-lanterns. The kids are standing behind the pumpkins they each designed. Again this year, we had them draw a face on the pumpkin and we helped them cut it out. It was a lot of fun.

This year, I made sure to save out most of the seeds, and toasted them. They're really good, but kind of hard/tricky to hull, so I'm not sure what I'll do with them other than put them in a bag and snack on them occasionally. I saw a recipe for making a pumpkin seed brittle, but you need 3 cups of hulled seeds for it. That would take me forever unless I figure out a quick and efficient way to hull the seeds.

So yeah, it's been a fun Halloween week. Monday, for family night, we baked cookies and decorated them to ding-dong-ditch deliver them to some of our ward friends. Tuesday the whole family went to mutual for a "spooky" dinner. Yesterday, pumpkins. Now I guess we better come up with something for the next couple nights to keep it going. Sounds like fun.

Here's Tegan singing "This is Halloween" from Nightmare Before Christmas.