A Busy Busy Halloween Week

Okay, I've already blown it on blogging every day in November. Sorry, blog! We were pretty darn busy all weekend, painting the downstairs in preparation for my family's arrival this Thanksgiving. HOWEVER...I will continue to blog as much as I can throughout the month. Here's hoping I don't miss too many more days!

This last week was Halloween week and I have three small kids...enough said! Okay, I'll say a little more...I'll at least post our family home evening jack o' lantern-carving pictures, and you'll have to wait for tomorrow for the final Halloween pictures, because it's late and I'm tired...so there.

Here are our pumpkins...you may remember we purchased them during our trip to Agua Linda Farm a couple of weeks before. Well, the pumpkins' time of waiting was at an end...it was CARVING TIME.

In our house, Nathan insists on carving the pumpkins...he calls it the "man's job." However, he has a strong aversion to pumpkin guts, so cleaning out the pumpkins falls to me. I have no such qualms about getting slimy up to the elbows; read this post if you don't believe me. So, I managed to get the pumpkins all cleaned out and ready for Nathan when he got home from work.

We still aren't letting the girls wield their own knives, but we are trying to give them maximum design input. Sometimes, we print up a large picture of a pumpkin and have them draw their ideal jack o' lantern faces. Still, they love to hang out and watch the whole process.

And here are the results of Nathan's hard work (he grumbled about his lack of talent throughout, but personally I thought he did just fine):

Celeste's jack o' lantern is the one on the left; Aurora's is in the middle; and Lorelai's is on the right. We stuck our little ghost decoration next to them just because. After lighting up the jack o' lanterns, we turned off all the lights and watched "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" with the kids (Snoopy and his Red Baron battles were Lorelai's highlight). A friend lent us the video...we will have to buy it for ourselves next year!

Tune in tomorrow to see the jack o' lanterns adding some pizazz to our front yard on Halloween night!