Fall

 We have a crazy amount of trees in our yard.  The kids had a blast jumping in them and spreading them back out on the grass while Ben tried to rake them up.

 There is a head attached to that helmet...

 Mid-jump! Yes!

 Why yes, we always make our kids wear helmets when they play in the leaves.

Sammi is such a copycat

Love these kids!

Love These Little Faces!

The Festivities

 For some reason every year, I forget what pumpkin carving entails.  I think it's going to be this wonderful, short-ish family activity where everyone has a great time and we end the night with a cute Halloween movie while eating roasted pumpkin seeds.

Not so.

The reality is, it dissolved into us pleading with our kids to just touch the pumpkin guts once, just once, and then we promised we'd hollow out the rest.  So this picture with the pumpkin guts scooper was fake.  Totally fake.  Emerson just likes running around with the tools, and that includes the little saws.  Don't worry though, we drew the line at the butcher knives we used to cut the zig-zag tops off the pumpkins.

"Don't make me touch the guts!"

 We finally got all four pumpkins hollowed out, and then we set about choosing designs.  Sammi wanted Ariel AND Tiana AND Cinderella on hers.  Mom isn't that patient, so I chose just plain Ariel for her.  And did she help me carve it?  No.  Emerson chose some vampire demon thing for his design.  Before he settled on that though, he also liked about 20 designs, so Daddy helped him choose.  He sincerely wanted to help Dad carve, and he helped a little, but then both kids ended up on couch while we kept hitting "play" on another Jake and the Neverland Pirates episode.  Meanwhile, I kept grumbling about how cheap they make the little pumpkin-carving saws and tools.  I swear they used to be better quality and didn't so easily bend in half.  (Did I mention the night deteriorated quickly?)

 About 7 hours later (ok, 2) we were finished with the kids' pumpkins.  And look! They are in their jammies!  Makes sense though since it seemed like it was about the middle of the night by this time.

Yay, Ariel!

Yay, Dracula demon thing!

So to finish out the night, we put the kids in bed and finished carving our own pumpkins.  And we did have roasted pumpkin seeds, but they weren't done roasting until midnight.  I'm serious.  It only takes like an hour to roast them, but we had so many that they wouldn't all fit in the oven at the same time.  (Now that I wrote that, it sounds like we had loose pumpkin seeds busting out the seams of our oven.)  We only have 2 racks in our miniature easy-bake-size oven, and those pans were filled to capacity.

To pass the time until the blasted seeds were roasted, we read Mockingjay together.  (I know, we are so behind to not have finished the series, but we are getting there!  Don't you dare spoil the ending.)  Then I pulled the dang seeds out and we collapsed into bed.  I think next year we might paint our pumpkins, or at least draw jack-o-lantern faces on with a Sharpie.