Halloween '13 - Carving Contests, Dress-Up, and Friday Flair

Another Halloween in the books. This has never been my favorite holiday but it sure is fun to experience it through the eyes of my kids. Let's look at what this day had in store for our family.

In my last post I shared the Halloween Pails I created out of coffee cans. The boys loved them and they got a lot of attention at the Harvest Festival we attended. My husband said people kept asking if he was a painter! Too funny. Aren't my little super hero, ninja, and batman cute sporting their adorable pails?

Speaking of cute, while we didn't take Samuel and Amelia out with us, we still wanted to dress them up for their first Halloween. Tell me...are they not the cutest hot dog and chick you have ever seen? I sure think so!

 In my recent post about our trip to the pumpkin patch, I mentioned that we were again going to be participating in the school's pumpkin carving contest again. Want to see what we came up with? Nathan designed this stegosaurus and Jordan helped create the pirate ship. We managed to place 3rd in the creative category for the third year in a row....can you guess which pumpkin was the award winner? Congratulations Jordan, that pirate ship was awesome (and the stegosaurus was a winner in my books as well)!

And as if I hadn't crammed enough into this post, I wanted to try to fit in a Friday Flair as well since I have missed the last few. We have been hit hard with pink eye, ear infections and tonsillitis for two weeks so needless to say, lunches weren't the top priority. Here's what they boys' got for lunch on Halloween:

pumpkin shaped pb and honey sandwiches, graham crackers, carrots and celery (yes, that's an ear in there!), and a special treat of boogers (thank you Dollar Store for this absolutely disgusting candy that is bound to have my guys in giggles)

Halloween Fun

Our family won't really be celebrating Halloween on the day this year as my husband is working night shift and that is when we would normally go to our church's Harvest Festival. But that doesn't mean we haven't had plenty of Halloween fun already!

Last weekend we made our annual fall trek to Greenbluff for some fun on the farm. This year we picked Walter's Farm where we met up with my brother and his family for some pony rides, tractor rides through the orchard, and of course scouring through the pumpkin patches for just the right gourd.

Jordan riding Daisy

Daddies took the kids through the orchard

Isaiah found one just his size

Shouldn't the ones with all the energy be pulling the cart instead of riding in it?

 

 

Friday Nathan's school was having a Family Pumpkin Carving Contest. So my husband let his creative juices flow and they put together this really adorable Pumpkin Piggy Bank. Nathan proudly came home with a 3rd place ribbon in the Creative category! While he was at school Jordan worked on a tribute to his favorite food by carving his pumpkin into a hotdog:)

He's proud, can you tell?

3rd Place! He actually got a nice silk ribbon to keep as well:)

 

 

Mmmmm....Hot dog!

We rounded out the Halloween fun by heading to the town my brother and his family live in to attend Pumpkin Lane on Saturday. This is a two hour block of time where all the businesses hand out candy as families walk through town from place to place. We have been doing this for several years now and always have a blast. Next year we are thinking about all coming together with a theme for costumes. After all, we now have 9 people between our 2 families so that gives us a lot to work with! This year we had a hodge-podge of costumes. Nathan was in a homemade dinosaur costume, Jordan has been begging for months to wear the chicken costume Nathan wore 2 years ago, and Isaiah was in a monkey costume we have had for years. Easy peasy!

Dinosaur tail from Isaiah's birthday party, crocheted dinosaur hat and Daddy's make-up job:)

Yes, he's a chicken (but doubling as an Angry Bird!)

Our cute little cookie faced monkey

So indicative of their personalities - our happy dinosaur, angry chicken and confused monkey:)

All in all we have had a great October. Looking forward to the coming months and all of the holiday fun still to be had.

Halloween

He loves his beak!















Jordan is not so thrilled with the process:)


















My cute little animals:)














Yes, I continue to be ridiculously behind in blogging. I swear my life is not that much busier, I guess I have just been lazy:) So here we go with Halloween stuff.

On Halloween we let the kids dress up when we went to lunch with Grandma and Papa Murphy so that they could see their costumes. The kids were excited and they got lots of attention for being so cute. We made that night special by adding the face paint to complete their costumes. Nathan absolutely LOVED getting his face painted. Jordan, not so much. But they looked adorable non the less and we set out for our church's Harvest Festival. It is such a cool set up. One building is dedicated to preschoolers and one to elementary aged children. They got to do 20 different booths that had games ranging from fishing, to ring toss, to Plinko. At each booth they earned candy and sometimes a prize. They also had 3 bouncy houses. That was the kids' favorite part! Best of all, it was all free. By the end of it, they were exhausted. They only made it through about 12 booths but all that bouncing must have worn them out.

It was a lot of fun spending that day as a family making it about fun things. I know that since then we have had to dig out the face paint just for fun because Nathan liked that part of it so much. I'll try to get around to posting those pictures sometime soon too:)