It's the Great Pumpkin...

This past weekend, we held our annual pumpkin carving night. What this usually means is I get to cut open the pumpkins, scrape out and remove all the innards by myself, Dave carves a nice pumpkin face for the kids and I then clean everything up. It's not really an activity I look forward to each year. This year was a little better...Sam and Caleb did a lot of scraping and innard removing and actually carved a pumpkin each all by themselves. Peter didn't want to get his hands slimy so pretty much just watched me work. (I remember Sam and Caleb used to refuse to put their hands into the slimy pumpkins, too). Dave was busy making us a yummy dinner so we let him off the hook. Hey, anything as long as I don't have to cook!
This is the first year we used actual "pumpkin carving tools" which made the whole thing SO much better...as opposed to just using sharp kitchen knives that the kids aren't allowed to use anyway! Here's a picture of the finished pumpkins. They are already starting to shrivel up. I carved the two on the right; Sam did the one on the bottom left and Caleb did the one on the top left.

Sam is going to a Halloween party at the school tonight for all the 4th and 5th graders. Apparently this is an annual thing and should be lots of fun. After the party, they are given rolls of toilet paper and they actually get to run around the outside of the school, papering whatever they want to! (Their school is an "open air" campus with small, individual buildings connected by outdoor walkways). There are lots of big trees too! I couldn't believe it when I heard that, but, each kid had to sign a slip promising to arrive half an hour early for school the next morning to help cleanup. I'll be interested to see how it looks!?!

One more note about Halloween: Steph told me that on the TODAY show this week they were talking about all the candy that kids bring home from trick-or-treating. They said the average kid brings home 14,000 calories in their bag!!! That's fourteen THOUSAND, people! I couldn't believe my ears. But wait, there's more! They took a poll and the average mom (myself included) sneaks approximately ten pieces of candy per day from their kid's loot and is consuming an EXTRA 1,000 calories/day! Lucky for you guys I can do the math, and from that I can tell you that we will gain 2 pounds a week at that rate!!!! Yikes! Steph is such a party pooper.

This weekend I was on a cleaning frenzy and actually found lots of leftover Easter candy! I threw it out, of course, (after Dave ate a stale peanut butter cup) but thought it would be kinda funny to hand it out to the trick-or-treaters. Can you imagine your kid coming home with an old chocolate bunny in their bag? Or some marshmallow peeps?