Our Halloween Weekend...

Naya and Sodie surprised us with an overnight visit from college just to celebrate Halloween!

-photo by Mado
Earlier this summer, when we were in the hospital with Toucie for so many weeks, our lawn got majorly overgrown. We noticed some strange "volunteer" plants had cropped up...they turned out to be pumpkins! We've been watching them all this time hoping they'd be big enough (and orange enough!) to carve into jack-o-lanterns by Halloween...

...well, you have to work with what you got...

...unique, to say the least!

Naya and Sodie dressed up as Star Trek ensigns -photo by Mado

Mado's gorgeous monster self-portrait (holding the Waldorf doll she made in 7th grade...which is dressed in a holey sock for Halloween),

and Toucie was a mama-made dragon :)

We made skeleton gingerbread cookies like those I've been seeing around.

And had Pumpkin Soup for dinner!

We played "Pin the Wart on the Witch" using a big, beautiful witch that Toucie drew for us and stickers for the warts. (even though none of the witches we know have any warts at all) -photo by Mado

Sodie and Naya know the choreography to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and tried to teach it to Toucie...now that is entertainment. -photo by Mado

Later, Naya and Sodie had to go back to school, but the rest of us went off to a night of trick-or-treating:

-photo by Mado

Happy Halloween!

Halloween Handwork......a ghost tee-shirt

This is what we did for handwork recently, using  homemade stencils and acrylic paints.

It started with the little orange book on the right. It is a list of  ideas that Toucie made for herself :
wich
blak cat
gost
skilatn
monstr
gobln

The word gost is circled.

She had doodled some funny ghost faces on a piece of construction paper, so I carefully cut those features out to use as stencils. Then I made a stencil for a ghost body.

We used pale green paint to stencil on the ghost bodies and black for the faces.

Boo!

Halloween Baking...Pumpkin Pie

Toucie and Daddy went to a pumpkin farm recently. They went on a hayride, puzzled their way through a corn maze, saw an emu (and an emu egg!), picked a pumpkin, and took not one single picture for mama.

The pumpkin that Toucie brought home was adorable and small. She marched it right into the kitchen and announced that she wanted to carve it into a jack-o-lantern, then bake it into a pie. I am happy to assist such decisiveness!

Let's pick up here...post-jackolantern and pre-pie. We cut the pumpkin in half and baked it at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes until it was soft.

Toucie scooped the cooled pumpkin out of its shell and into a measuring cup...we were going for 2 cups of pumpkin.

Ingredients:

2 c  cooked pumpkin
2 eggs
1 1/2 c heavy cream
1/2 c raw sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp salt

(preheat oven to 425)

She mixed all the ingredients in a bowl and beat well. Then into the pie crust it went. Our pumpkin was not a special "sugar pumpkin" or "pie pumpkin"...it was a run-of-the-mill jackolantern type, so the flesh was not the rich, orange color that we normally associate with a perfect pumpkin pie. (We didn't care!)

The pie goes into a 425 degree oven for 15 minutes, then we turned the temperature down to 350 for another 40 minutes of baking time.

The MOST delicious pumpkin pie we've ever had. No kidding.
I think it lasted about 11 hours :)

October Watercolor....Pumpkin Painting

This idea came from Our Little Nature Nest. Mado joined Toucie and I for painting time and it was great...she is an expert at wet-on-wet watercolors! I adapted the story to suit our own style, so here it is with the changes (and a tip of the hat to Kytka from whose site the story came originally):

The golden moon shone bright in the indigo sky.

(paint a large yellow circle in the center of the paper. Rinse brush and begin painting blue around the edges of the paper for the sky)

The sky pressed in from all sides but the glowing moon said, “You must leave me some room to breathe”, so the blue sky surrounded her gently, but did not touch her.

(try to paint the sky in rich blue without touching the yellow so as not to create any green!)

The autumn night was chill and the moon felt very cold. Nearby, the Red Star saw her shivering and said, “I will warm you, Moon!”.  The red starlight washed over the moon and she felt a glow of warmth all over.

(rinse and dry brush, dip into the red paint , and paint over the yellow circle, creating an orange circle. Rinse and dry brush.)

“Oh!” said the moon, “It is very cozy to be clothed in starshine, but I cannot see out! Please open some spaces so that I may peek out.” And so, the sky opened up a little hole for one eye to peek out, and then another, (etc, for the nose and mouth).

(with a clean brush that you’ve dried on your paper towel, begin to lift off paint, rinsing and drying the brush again after each “erasing” stroke you make on the painting. Create a jack-o-lantern face out of the “holes” you open)

Anyone down on the earth below who was looking up at the moon that night was quite delighted and surprised to see a _______ shining down on them!

(My 5 yr. old child was quite amazed to see a pumpkin face emerge from her moon painting . I paused in saying the sentence above to let her fill in the blank with “jack-o-lantern!” as if she had worked magic right there on the paper! Which, of course, she had.)

Toucie's pumpkin

Mado's pumpkin