Costumes and Pumpkins

I had a great idea yesterday. Since Mondays are no-school days for Evyn and Reed, I thought we would stay home, dress up in costumes for pictures and work out the costume kinks since they are wearing the costumes to school on Wednesday and Evyn says hers is itchy and Reed had never even tried his on. Great! That is what we did. Five minutes of cold air and non-cooperative kids led to two muddy costumes and no great pictures. By the way, in case you cannot tell, Evy is Ariel and Reed is a bat.

Since the costumes went over like a tons of bricks, I thought for sure they would get into the pumpkin carving - goo, seeds and sharp objects would surely be a hit. E and R each picked their pumpkins out and quickly disappeared while I gathered the supplies. Evyn hesitantly joined me in the kitchen while Reed flat out refused. I was thinking this would probably be best anyway - Evyn is the crafty holiday lover of the two of them. Well, as you can see from her expression below, she did not give a shit about the pumpkins either. She left me the moment after this picture was snapped.

So, I spent the next 45 minutes or so in the kitchen all alone, carving out the pumpkin face that Reed had picked out. They thought I did a great job, but Evyn was slightly miffed that I did not continue on to cut her spider design out of her pumpkin. Although I did not let them know, I did actually enjoy myself, but it would have been more fun if someone had at least been there to talk to me while I worked the pumpkin over.

This next one is just for fun. Evy and I created this Ms. Potato Head Witch Pumpkin a few weeks ago:

As some of you know, we planted giant pumpkin seeds in the spring. The packet said that the fruit could reach 400 to 600 pounds. I was a little scared when all of the seeds sprouted and the packet said to space the plants out 15 feet. I did not come close to spacing them that far apart, however, we had lots of baby pumpkins starting out. One of them, I know, would have been at least 100 pounds if our elderly, three-legged dog, Misha, had not started chomping away at the pumpkin vines. She saw to it that we had no *great* pumpkins this year. I think one of our beagles' spirits must have inhabited Misha's body - she is usually not the one to do things like that. Although we did end up with two small pumpkins from our garden that are not quite orange, I was hoping to have a huge pumpkin to carve from garden this year, but that did not quite work out either. See a theme here? Maybe next year......