All for ME!

I couldn't convince them to even try one...they are delicious and apparently ALL MINE!

Drizzle seeds with olive oil and move them around to coat

Lightly salt
325 degrees for about 20-25 minutes

More pumpkins!

Since the kids's didn't really get to carve their own pumpkins with the knife dangers and all, they wanted to decorate their little pumpkins. For some reason, they were fixated on the hair. They loved having a pumpkin with hair. I even bit the bullet and let them color with Sharpies. Ooooh dangerous! :)

Pumpkin Carving

Cinderella

Lightning McQueen

John McCain (My husband's pumpkin of course :) )

Pumkin Carving in our house is a little complicated. The kids pick the designs they want to have on their pumpkin and then we put the patterns on the pumpkins and poke the holes with them to show the pattern on the pumpkin and then mommy and daddy carve them. My daughter couldn't have picked a more difficult one to carve. There are 2 toothpicks hidden in Cinderella holding it together. Of course, they look a lot better when they are lit, but we need to go get some candles before tomorrow. Who knew pumpkin carving took 3 hours :)

Play Dough Pumpkins

We have been talking about what we want our pumpkins to look like once we carve them so today we made some homemade play dough and made some pumpkins of our own as a dry run. :)

Play Dough Recipe

2 cups of Flour

1 cup of salt

4 Tablespoons cream of Tarter

2 cups cold water

4 Tablespoons of oil

food coloring

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients, in another bowl combine the wet. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well. Cook on high uncovered in the microwave for 2 minutes. Remove and stir. Cook on high for another 2 minutes and mix again. Let cool, then knead well to mix. Store in an air tight container or zipper bag.

Monkey Bread with my Monkeys!!

About once a month we make monkey bread on Sunday mornings. It is fun to make with the kids, but it is in no way good for you. WE LOVE IT! A friend of mine gave me her recipe a couple of years ago and I am almost ashamed at how easy it is to make. The kids love to help making it.

Ingredients:
2 tubes of ready made biscuit dough (I use the 16.3 oz Grands)
1 of a cup of sugar
4 Tablespoons of cinnamon
1 stick of butter

I have changed the original recipe slightly, but it is definitely delicious! I mix the sugar and cinnamon in a bowl. I cut each biscuit into 4 and roll them into a ball and roll completely in the cinnamon sugar mixture. Then I toss it into a tube pan that has been sprayed with Pam. After I have one layer covering the bottom of the pan, I sprinkle with a little more cinnamon sugar. Then I finish rolling the dough and when all of it is done I sprinkle a little more cinnamon sugar and then melt a stick of butter and pur it in the remaining cinnamom sugar mixture. I stir it up completely and then pour it over the dough in the pan. Then it goes in a 350 degree oven for about 30-35 minutes. It makes the house smell GREAT!

STRIKE!!!

I must admit that I haven't been bowling in over 5 years. So, since our kids REALLY love bowling on the Wii, we decided to give it a try. We had the BEST time! Thankfully, it was bumper bowling. Although, I was really sweating a little bit in the first game since I was in last place! I really needed to step up my game. HAHA! I think our 2 year old loved the ball return a lot more than the actual hitting of the pins. Our son celebrated for every single pin that was knocked down. It didn't matter if it was just one or all ten. It is so nice to see that he doesn't have that competitive streak yet. We all had a great time and we all can't get wait to go back again!

Ghosts!!

I couldn't resist making these today. I was dropping my son off at preschool this morning and one of the other classes were making these super cute ghosts. I knew I already had the cheese cloth, so I had to stop on the way home to get the liquid starch. I bet you could you could use watered down Elmer's as well, but I needed more of that too. My son LOVED getting his hands all sticky and messy. My daughter, not so much. :-)

All you have to do is dip the cheese cloth in the liquid starch and squeeze out the excess and drape them over cups. I used 2 layers of cheese cloth. Make sure it is long enough to spread out on the plate that you have set it on so the bottom looks all floaty when it dries. Then I used a yarn needle to make a loop in the top so I could hang them. They look so cute. This photo doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea.

Pretty Candles!

In an effort to convince my husband that we needed to buy new glasses, the kids and I decided to cover them with glue and tissue paper to make cute votive holders. I am just kidding. These glasses were old anyways :) You can't buy new glasses in the middle of an economic crisis LOL!


We coated these glasses with good ole Elmer's and then put tissue paper squares on them. Then we coated the tops of the tissue paper with more glue. They turned out pretty well. The kids really loved doing it. My daughter liked it because she could do it all on her own.

Boo at the Zoo!

Every year our zoo has Boo at the Zoo. That basically means that all the kids can get dressed up in their costumes (YEAH, one more day to get use out of those costumes) and get some candy at the candy stations throughout the zoo and see the animals. The only problem with this today was that my daughter thought that she needed to eat every piece of candy that was given to her today, uggg.

What a better time to look at the bears and stingrays than when you are dressed up as Sportacus and Stephanie from LAZYTOWN. If you don't know what that is, check it out. I think this show is quite bizarre myself, but the kids love it. It is an Icelandic children's show....very interesting.

Pajama Party!

My husband is out of town tonight, so we decided to have a pajama party! We started out having a floor picnic on some blankets (we had pizza... yummy!) and we read stories, played with our felt boards we made and made some cookies. I found a VERY yummy cookie recipe and they were awesome! My husband will be jealous we did this one without him. I wonder if there will be any left in 4 days when he returns....HAHA!

Is it winter yet? (hee hee)

I had a lot (an embarrassing amount) of extra winter fabric, so I made quilts for both of the kids to keep in the play room. They keep dragging their bed blankets down from their beds to make forts or have blanket picnics, so I decided to make ones they could keep there.

So after I made the quilts I had a lot of extra fleece (that is from the back of the quilt) and I decided to make them some scarves. I don't know why, but they both LOVE scarves. In fact, they have been wearing them for the past hour and a half inside the house. My 2 year old keeps asking me if it is going to snow. :)

The scarves were so easy. I remember reading about how to make them, but I can't remember where that was in order to add the link or if it was from the magazine. Anyways, I used about a 5 foot X 1 foot piece of fleece and put the 2 long sides together and sewed it up and turned it inside out. Then I sewed about 6 inches across both ends and cut the fringe. Sooooo easy. Or should I say sew easy. HA! That was bad, I know.

Halloween magnets

I found these cute wood shapes at Michael's and we used our wood markers that I got from Oriental Trading to color them and then we put magnets on the back of them and PRESTO! It is a cute magnet I can use to hang up some more of their artwork :)

We also made those ghost suckers. I can remember making those when I was little. It is so fun to teach your kids how to do things that you used to do when you were their age.

Ahhhh. leaves

We went to the pumpkin patch again today with my son's preschool. It was really nice and we did things that we didn't do on Sunday like the hayride. It was a much better fall day. :)

Once we got home the kids played outside for a good 2 hours in the leaves. Who knew they could be so much fun! If only they could rake and bag :)

SPOOOOOOOOOOKY!

We have been reading a lot of books about Halloween and we have seen a few movies about it also. We have been talking about what makes something Spooky and this is what they thought of...darkness and a spooky tree. We used foam sheets with this project and I found some really cool foam stickers at Michael's that had pumpkins and masks. Their pictures turned out really cute, but SPOOOOOOOOKY. :)

Almost the perfect day for the pumkin patch...

Today we went to the pumpkin patch. The leaves on the trees were a beautiful, red, yellow and orange. We fed the goats, went down the tube slides, jumped on the giant air filled pumpkin, played in hay until it was in every crack and crevice, and picked out 5 perfect pumpkins. We even got some kettle corn to take home. It was perfect except for the fact that it was 82 degrees outside....what the heck??

The right way to eat apples....

We made these yummy apples yesterday. We melted about 30 of those Milk Maid Caramels and put 1 tablespoon of corn syrup in the microwave until it was all melted and then we coated all the apples. Once the caramel was hard, we melted some semisweet chocolate chips and then covered it again. After that, I put them in the fridge and brought them out once they were solid. These make great fall gifts....or anytime for that matter.

CRAZY Pumpkins!

Today we made pumpkins out of craft sticks. We brought out the markers and colored them and then we used glue (my son's favorite :) ) and then we used pom poms, googley eyes, feathers and buttons to decorate them. Aren't they silly?

Fun Crayons!!

These were the crayons we used on our leaf rubbings the other day. My son used to take the paper off of all of his crayons before he would use them, so it made these super easy. We had so many old, broken crayons that I just broke them up and put them in this mini muffin tin. I put them in the oven on 250 degrees until they were good and melted. Put them in the freezer until solid and they will pop right out. The kids loved using these!

PRETZELS! GET YOUR HOT PRETZELS!

Today we made hot pretzels. I am not sure if it is a good or bad thing that we know how to make them. They are VERY delicious!

Here is the recipe we used from my buddy Alton Brown. The only thing I changed in the recipe was, I baked them in the oven for 12 minutes then put them in the boiling water for 30 seconds and then back in the oven for 12 more minutes until golden brown. Mmmmmmmm they were so good that I sort of miss them right now....

Cookies!! YUMMMMMMMY

Today we decided to make some quick cut out sugar cookies. I cheated and used a mix instead of making them from scratch. The kids loved them just as well. Who doesn't like cut out cookies with icing and sprinkles?? I was even going to color the icing but my son wanted to keep it white. Works for me!!

Fun with Nature!

Today is a chilly day, so what better way to enjoy the outdoors (albeit brief :) ) than to go on a scavenger hunt for things we find outside for our art project. We took our bags outside and gathered things up in them (leaves, pine cones, seeds, pine needles etc. ) and then we went inside and glued them on our paper. The kids really loved piling on the glue just to make sure that everything would stick (wink wink).

Fall is here!!!

We have had a busy morning!! The leaves have started to change and it was wonderful to go on a scavenger hunt for leaves and pine cones for our crafts this morning!!

We covered pine cones in peanut butter then sprinkled them with bird seed and hung them on our tree for the birds to eat.

Then we found some pretty leaves to do some crayon rubbings. We just put some leaves under our paper and used some crayons to rub on top of the paper to reveal the leaves underneath.

Finally, we arranged our leaves on some wax paper and ironed them so we could make a fall sun catcher to put on our patio door. Here I sanwiched some leaves in between 2 sheets of wax paper and put a hand towel under the wax paper and a hand towel on top of the wax paper and ironed at a medium setting.

We had so much fun! We love being able to run around outside and enjoy this cooler weather. Our house is really beginning to look like fall!