Family Night? What we do for our kids!

We decided to have a family day getting ready for Halloween! Ok, so maybe I should have split up some of the activities...or the two that we did, but time got away and it was the night before Halloween!

For one activity, which ended up after the cookies, we carved pumpkins, then lit them up for outside! We decided to draw the faces on first, and then cut them out.

Jaxson spent a very long time making the perfect face, Kenna just drew on the pumpkin with a marker that was almost dried out and DJ just dove in! I had a bit more thought and tried to come up with something other than the "classic" jack-o-lantern, but was only creative with the zig-zag portion.

After Jaxson finished coloring his, he decided to just leave it like that and don't cut it (we carved a pumpkin the night before and he didn't like the feel or want to get dirty so I had to do it myself). When we took them out to light them up, Jaxson got all upset because his wasn't glowing like the rest of ours! So after we cleaned up all the mess, and put everything back in order, DJ carved a face in his pumpkin so that Jaxson could light it up too! What we do for our kids right? They did turn out pretty cute!

For our second activity of the day, Jaxson and Kenna "helped" me make cookies. When Kenna stopped eating all the cutouts, we were able to bake them. We made all sorts of bats, pumpkins and ghosts! Jaxson was going to help me decorate them later in the day. Some were for the goodie bags for his preschool party. However, when the time came to "help" me decorate them.......he did one and found something better to do. So, like a good mom , I said OK and I didn't force him to help.

The problem was, now that I was decorating them alone, I could get creative....or more detailed. This being the perfectionism in myself that I love so much. So it wasn't enough to have colored pumpkins......I had to go one step further and make them jack-o-lanterns. And what is a ghost without eyes and an open mouth? You get the picture! So I finally finished around 10 pm last night, just in time to put together the goodie bags and throw in a couple cookies (only to be eaten by 4 year olds who really don't care how cute they are) and head off to bed.

Well, that all sounded fine, but then I remembered that I still had to make the fruit dip that I was signed up to bring for the party...so I quickly finished that and thought....now to bed. Oh, but wait, Jaxson is a firefighter and the costume is borrowed. There is a little name badge that goes to it, but it has another name written in permanent marker and there is no way around it to write or white out over it. So I had told Jaxson earlier in the day that I would find a new picture of a badge and and make a new one. Earlier in the day though, the printer was not working because I had torn the whole computer apart to clean it and changed the cartridge so that the badge was red and not pink! Right before bed, around 10:30, I got my masterpiece finished. I even "laminated" it with packing tape! So I sit here wondering, as I am dressed in an improvised witch's costume because it's not acceptable to not be dressed up on Halloween, why do I go to all this trouble? It's not like the kids will know that I spent 45 minutes making the "perfect" badge, or that I spent over an hour decorating the cookies, but I know! I guess it just goes into the category of "someday they'll thank me for this!"