Happy Halloween!

Sadly, dressing up in the most creative costume you can scrounge from around the house and wandering around the neighbourhood taking candy from strangers are not nearly as big here as they are in the U.S. It happens, just not to the extent that it does in other parts of the world. Given the fact that taking a three-year-old and two almost-two-year-olds out trick-or-treating in a neighbourhood that was only minorly receptive to the idea (not a single costume-clad kid has knocked on our door tonight) was not terribly appealing, I'd planned to spend the evening carving a couple of small pumpkins with the kids. Halloweeny enough, right?

But, alas, all does not always go as planned. I haven't had time to check on local pumpkin patches (I'm not even sure they exist here like they do in the U.S.), and I haven't had time to pick up a couple of small pumpkins from the grocery store. So I called Eric and asked him to pick up a couple of pumpkins and a bag full of sweets on his way home from work. Unfortuanately, Eric's tasks for the day took him several hours away from Stratford-upon-Avon, and there was a nice big car accident on the motorway right around the time that he was supposed to be headed home. I was left with no pumpkins and no sweets on Halloween. So I improvised:

Desi's jack-o-lantern

Rhys's jack-o-latern

Ben's jack-o-lantern

Mommy's jack-o-latern Arts and crafts abound!

Art a la Rhys...

Art a la Desi...

Art a la Ben (who tends to be way too restless to sit through arts and crafts hour)...

Move over Jackson Pollock.

Despite a rather blah Halloween, we have loads of fantastic artwork, and our walls are bright and beautiful. And besides, Christmas is right around the corner, and we all know how much I absolutely, positively love Christmas.

P.S. - Even if you're not impressed, pretend anyway. Rhys traced these:

Traced, as in, these letters were written on a piece of paper and she put her tracing paper over them, took her red marker in hand, and traced them. And in her own words, these are "R for Rhys, H for Hagrid, Y for...um...Y, and an S for Sofia!" She also painted the letters for this:

I may be enormously biased, but I'm impressed.