Wax accessories, dressing up, and decorating

My all time favorite of Halloween sweets are wax lips. I still remember them from my youth. With boys I get to add wax mustaches to the mix. FUN!!!

 I couldn't decide which picture made me laugh the most...so I included nearly all of the shots :) Each one is just different enough with someone being just enough "off" that I giggle at every one.

Hmmmm...let me think about that a moment.

 I told the kids that we would absolutely NOT decorate for Halloween if they couldn't get their messes cleaned up. I'm not really a decorate-for-the-holidays kind of a girl and I most certaintly was not about to add decor on top of clutter. Well the really long story short is that they never did it until this afternoon. By then putting up decorations just to take them down less then 24 hours later seemed silly. And that is exactly what I told Karaia when she asked if we could decorate now. Her reply?

"It's ok, mom. I'll do everything. I put it all up and I'll take it all down! Please!!!"

I thought that sounded very reasonable and gave her free range of the decorations on hand. Everything you see was 100% her idea. I didn't suggest one little thing. Right down to the choice of accessories and the placement of them. The only thing I helped with was placing some of the webbing a bit higher than she could reach. But that was by her request.

 

When she asked if she could move a table to the porch, throw gauzy fabric over it, and "put a bunch of Halloween stuff." on top, I may have teared up just a little. Be still my heart! My daughter is a natural decorator!

She was even moving the very few decorations we had inside to the outside and reusing them. *love*

 

We had SO many comments on our decorations tonight. Even I was surprised at how many people loved it enough to tell me so. Nice work Karaia!

 Here's the foursome. All decked out ready to go.

 Tennyson's pumpkin is a dinosaur. Sanders wanted a happy face. Karaia carved a bat.

 This is Beckham's masterpiece. He did a wonderful job and was pretty stinkin' proud of himself. As he should be :)

 The big Family pumpkin designed and carved by Karaia and the pumpkin she painted.

Happy Halloween!

Pumpkin fun

I made my family look into the sun for this picture. Some of us are better at this than others *wink*

 We went to the pumpkin patch with our friends the Russons on Friday.  We had already got a few pumpkins from our cousin's pumpkin patch so we were on the look out for one BIG family pumpkin.

Seriously, Mom?!?! In the sun again.

"We need one THIS big"

Aww sweet!

 Then the carving started.

 Karaia had the honor of designing and drawing the face on the big pumpkin

 Beckham felt very ambitions this year and wanted to tackle a very intricate design. He did ALL the cutting himself. I'll post pictures tomorrow.

Oh, looks like we're back to the patch again and I'm too lazy to rearrange the pictures.

 Ok, let's try again with a family picture. (On a side note, by the look of my arm it seems to me that I need to hit the weights a little more...sigh)

This the is the best one of MOST of us. Too bad Sanders looks like he might be dying. :) Or perhaps he's getting his zombie on for the up coming holiday. Also...now that I look at it a bit closer...Tennyson looks like he might be doing something more than just sitting. Oh well.

Let's play a little game called Where's Sanders

The moral of the story is that it's probably not the best idea to dress your wanderlust two year old in orange when you are going to a pumpkin patch.

The kids had a great time. Sanders LOVED the pumpkin patch and the carving. Although he didn't quite understand the concept of the carving at first and freaked out when we started cutting his beloved pumpkin up.

Karaia and Beckham are getting more independent every year. I love seeing what they come up with.

Tennyson was just happy we were together. That's kind of how he rolls.