Pumpkin week was awesome! We started out Monday at the Pumpkin Farm where we enjoyed beautiful weather and picked our pumpkins. As always, we read lots of stories about pumpkins (which for some reason a couple had the same theme, pumpkins overrunning towns.) and we did lots of fun pumpkin-related activities. We finished up the week with pumpkin pancakes for breakfast Sunday morning.
One evening after dinner we played with homemade play dough, made using this recipe, which was super-easy. I made two colors, orange and green. The dough was squishy and fun. We used cookie cutters provided on loan from Grandma Wood, which the boys had a great time stamping into the dough. (oh, and every couple minutes, Justin would ask, “Eat?” and start to take a bite.) Daddy and Mommy made the tiny 3D pumpkins. It was the first play dough experience and definitely one we will do again.
For a snack one afternoon I let the boys help me make prepared fridge cookies, you know, the kid you spread out onto a pan and bake? Joshua couldn’t wait so he sort of bit into one. Justin loved watching them bake. Sure we could have made real sugar cookies with the cookie cutters, but let’s be real here…
We did a two-day art project which yielded jack o’lanterns which now live in our front door window. I printed blank pumpkins (Yay, Google Images!) and colored them roughly with markers. I gave the boys cups of water and paint brushes to smear around the markers. Once they were dry we added faces, which were cut from construction paper and glued on. They placed the face pieces, impressive since they even look like faces.
Our final activity was decorating the pumpkins we picked out on the farm. Rather than carving them, we went with painting. Plain washable tempera paint onto the pumpkins with stripes or dots masked off. (in case of full coverage, I wanted some orange.) When the paint was dry we added face stickers, also printed from Google Images, this time onto full-sheet adhesive. Now both boys walked by the pumpkins and said, “Hi, Pumpkins!” several times today.
Happy Halloween!
