Halloween and its Aftermath

 Happy Halloween everyone!  We love this holiday - it's a great way to ease into the Fall season and looming Winter. 

We spent Monday night carving our carefully-picked-from-our-favorite-pumpkin-patch pumpkins.  Uncle Noley and Aunt Christy came over for the gutting and cutting.  Dad even let Sam and me carve with knives this year (carefully supervised of course). 

Here's the gutting - we're not even squeamish about pumpkin guts anymore - it's fun!!!

Sam and I each drew the lines for our pumpkin faces and then carefully carved.  

It took a lot of concentration but it was really fun to be able to do it ourselves!

 And here we are with our finished Jack-O-Lanterns.  Dad's is in the middle.  Do we look as scary as our pumpkins?

 How about with the lights off?

And here we are on Halloween morning - ready for school.  I went with my Brave Knight costume and Sam wore his Shark costume. 

Let's get up close and personal - get a good look at me as a fierce Brave Knight. 

And here is a full view of Sam as a Shark.  People kept asking him if he was a great white.  His answer was "No, I'm Sam!".  Funny kid!

 Mom got to come to my class to help with the Halloween party.  She did a carefully-chosen-by-me craft with our class.  I told her how to give the instructions for the craft and all about my classmates.  We did a scratch-and-reveal Halloween picture.  It was a hit!

One of the other parents did a fun activity where we used toilet paper to make mummies out of each other.  Our headmaster, Mr. Mason (great name, huh!), wandered in and we turned him in to a mummy.  Good times!

We went Trick-or-Treating around our neighborhood for a while.  We brought home quite the haul of candy.  Here we are going through it (this is Sam's haul) with mom and dad.  Probably the funniest thing that happened while we were out trick-or-treating was that Sam kept commenting to all of our neighbors . . . . "nice pumpkins you've got here".  He sure is a funny kid!

Needless to say with all the extra energy from a fun holiday, lots of sugar, and not being able to wrestle with daddy for a few weeks now (hurt back, poor daddy!), we needed to get out and burn off some of it.  Mom and dad took us to the bouncey house place on Saturday morning.  It was sooooo much fun!  2 and 1/2 hours of pure running, bouncing, sliding, tackling, climbing, jumping fun!  Ahhhh it was great!

Some of the inflatables are super big!  That translates into super fun!

Surprisingly enough, we still had lots of energy when we got home so we tackled some yard work with the parents.  It is the leaf time of year at our house.  Mom was kind enough to leave a big pile on the ground for us to jump and play in before she dumped it with the rest of the leaves into the trash.  Here we are making leaf angels.  



 Leaves really are a lot of fun to play in.  We'll have plenty more opportunities for leaf play in the next few weeks.  And let's assume that our energy level will peak in the next few weeks and the anticipation of Christmas comes on. 

 Sam Alert:  Hey everyone - any long-time follower of our blog knows that I {LOVE} to be outside.  I will do anything to be outside - anything!  Including work!  Matter of fact, I'll beg for some chores outside just to get out of the house.  Here I am helping dad do some sweeping and leaf collecting in the side yard.  Dad would like to report that I am a great helper!

And here is a picture (blurry - sorry!) of me with my pumpkin.  Ah - what a great Halloween we had this year!

Sam out - catch you next week.