Halloween

Halloween has always been a holiday Chris and I have sort of avoided since living in this country. We have been undecided as parents whether we wanted to make a big deal out of it or avoid it. Up until now, it has been pretty easy to ignore, since the majority of people here have never heard of it or celebrate it. But this year, our neighbors decided to have a party for the kids and we decided- we think it could be fun this year. Chris is out of town, however, so that sort of left it up to me to celebrate.

Austin and I carved a small pumpkin I bought at the store yesterday. Fortunately, pumpkin is a popular and very cheap food here. I also bought a bunch of cut pumpkin slices to make pumpkin puree and made pumpkin spice cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese frosting for our party. It was yummy. I will freeze a bunch of the leftover puree for pumpkin bread later. Austin kept wanting to use the knife, which got a resounding "no" but he enjoyed scooping the pulp out.

I happened to have 2 costumes in the house, one for each boy, both supplied by a grandmother at random, non-Halloween times in the past. Austin loves his Thomas outfit, but the funny thing was when I first told him he would wear it for our Halloween party, he said "I want to be a pumpkin face". I was so taken aback because Austin has basically no knowledge or experience of Halloween. No TV commercials or grocery stores decorated to see. Nothing. So I did not understand how he would even have the idea of dressing up, decide he wanted to be something else and something as appropriate as a pumpkin (this was before we carved ours). Then I realized he had seen posters at the library about Halloween. They did decorate there- he had mostly liked the spider web at the library. But they did have a lot of posters of jack-o-lanterns and I guess that is where he learned about "pumpkin faces". But I told him we would make a real pumpkin face, but he could be Thomas and he was agreeable and excited to be Thomas.

Isn't he cute? Bennett made a great monkey...check out Austin in the picture below, that was Christmas 2007 and Austin was exactly Bennett's age (13 months), when my parents came to visit and my Mom brought this cute costume.


Here we are at the party. Austin did not really get into the games. They had pumpkin carving (he did like that) and a few others. There was a dance contest, during which Austin stood absolutely still in the middle of the room surrounded by other dancing kids. He gets pretty shy in any social setting and was not in a great mood anyway, but he did not want to participate. His favorite thing though was, guess? Candy of course. They passed out candy at the end, no actual door to door trick or treating.


Here is the little monkey himself...one of his favorite things to "say".