Harvest Costume

So the Awana solution to the whole halloween/costume dilemma, is to have a Harvest Party.  Last year they told the kids to dress like a farm animal, which had me frantically searching online trying to find a chicken costume.  I ended up finding a chicken hat/mask thing at Party City.  This year it was 'dress as anything harvest related'.  Could my daughter be a farmer?  Or be a chicken again?  Or something like that?  Nope.  She wanted to be corn.  We discussed cutting out a corn shape and painting cotton balls yellow and gluing them on for corn kernels.  But I had reservations about how to actually get the cotton balls yellow.  So I found a home made ear of corn costume online that involved painting the bottoms of egg cartons yellow to use as the corn kernels.  This seemed like a better idea, and I dug through the recycling to find some cartons.  I should have asked my daughter before I did that.  I showed her the picture of the costume done with egg cartons, and she was not impressed.  So back to cotton balls.  I looked up how to dye them.  And I got started:

Looked pretty good.  But they wouldn't dry.  If I squeezed them out, they lost the yellow.  I probably could have tried with a hair dryer, but it didn't seem promising.  So I turned to facebook for suggestions on where I could buy yellow cotton balls.  Someone suggested yellow pom poms.  DUH!  That would be perfect, and had never occurred to me.  And it appeared that local craft stores would probably sell them.  But it looked like small quantity bags.  And in the meantime, I was given the suggestion to glue the cotton balls on and then spray paint them.  Then I tried to draw an ear of corn to cut out of cardboard, and well...it wasn't pretty.  So I begged my little sister to draw it for me (its not like she was busy having a birthday party for her two kids or anything.  She had nothing better to do then draw corn for me).  Her corn looked great!  So I went outside to spray paint the cotton balls yellow.

They looked really good!  Until I picked them up and realized there was now dead grass stuck all over them.  Unfortunately, I didn't have enough cotton balls to just throw those out.  So my sister in law came to the rescue and helped me, thank goodness!  We glued on the plain cotton balls I had left,  and then, God bless her, my sister in law sat there and picked grass off the spray painted cotton balls.  Then she taped a bag on so that when I spray painted I would only get the 'corn' yellow.

In the end it was all worth it

She loved it!  And she even won a box of candy for best costume :)

Halloween at Daddy's work.

Every year his company puts this on for the employees and their families.  This year was a little different for us since Simon no longer has an office!  Normally we go through everything and then sit in his office for awhile, which the kids loved!  But they still had a good time this year :)

They were very excited to finally be allowed to wear their costumes!

Cookie decorating

Playing games along the way

Caelin was so grossed out by this!  Luckily she did know that it was just food items in there.  I promised her that she didn't have to do it if they have it again next year, lol.

Bopping bats as they walk down the hall

This was supposed to be pumpkin bowling...Connor made it more pumpkin throwing!

This guy is pretty brave to take on this job!

Decorating a mask

Face painting

Claire wasn't cooperative for very many pictures, but she couldn't wait to jump in the chair and get her face painted!

You think its just the 'liberal' states...

Its not.

http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/10/17/sign-indiana-school-promotes-population-control-no-more-two-children

A friend on a facebook homeschooling page posted a link to this blog http://themattwalshblog.com/2013/10/23/we-are-going-to-home-school-our-kids-but-thats-only-because-we-hate-education/ , talking about how much she agreed with it.  As I was reading the blog, I got quite the reality check when I read about the school in INDIANA with a population control banner displayed in the hall.  As I looked into it more, I found very little information on it.  The original blog was written by a Priest who happened to see it in the hallway, and it was picked up by a few websites...but apparently there was no parent or public outcry within the community.  Which is sad and rather telling...

Scarecrow

So we had another wondefully 'fun' assignment for preschool a few weeks ago.  Dress like a scarecrow.  Seriously?  This was way worse than 'smelly show and tell'.  A scarecrow.  How exactly does one dress like a scarecrow?  In particular, how do you dress a 4 year old as a scarecrow and expect it to reasonably stay on for 2 hours?  Well in our case...it was more like 'dress like a farmer'.  But at least we tried.

P.S. I didn't let him take the sword.

Our big green machine!

I finally broke down and mowed our yard.  I came in totally tired from it and feeling like I didn't want to do a single thing except take a shower and go to bed!  And then I saw this:

Clearly I was not the only one who had to take a bath that night!!

On a side note...it turns out the kids (and the dog) are much more likely to play outside if the grass isn't up to their knees!  Who knew? ;)

Another Field Trip

We had a family field trip with Caelin's co-op school to a local farm/pumpkin patch.  It was a lot of fun and great that we could take the whole family!  The kids had a blast and I got to visit with some of the other moms, it was nice to visit and talk curriculum!

We got there and Caelin quickly found some friends:

And Connor quickly joined in:

We took our hayride:

Then walked around trying to find the perfect pumpkin.  Well most of us walked, some of us caught a ride:

The kids were happy with their selections:

A hayride back, which was much less crowded:

We played on the big haypile:

Then it was time for a snack:

They examined a daddy long legs:

And then it was time to see some animals and head home.  We all enjoyed our day!

Halloween Bunco

Just felt like sharing :)  A friend came up with the idea, and I thought it was really cute!  And worked out well!

S'mores!

The weather has been nice enough lately that I decided we really should get in one more night of s'mores while we can.  The kids like it...actually the kids like the idea and process more then they like s'mores.  They don't usually even want the marshmallows cooked! But whatever...its memories, right?