Friday, October 27, 2006
Decorating for trunk or treat
If you're here for ideas scroll down the page or click here.
My little pixie
Tonight we took Emma to the Halloween carnival at the elementary school. We had a dinner of pork BBQ, cole slaw and baked beans, then we hit the games. The only thing she was really able to do was the fishing game. She kind of held tight to her Daddy all evening. She wanted to be carried. The good news is that she never hollered for paci until she was truly tired and done.

Here she is dressed up at the store before we left...




Hanging on to Daddy.


Fishing for cheap junk prizes.


Cheap junk airplane which she destroyed thirty seconds after this picture was taken.

Reanimated pumpkin
M read that you can reanimate shriveled up pumpkins by soaking them in water so we tried it. You can see my mean pumpkin before and after. Frankly, I like the before guy better, he seems really mean and crotchety. The good news is he'll get that way again.

Before


After


During


The amazing thing is the transformation of his "lid." Before...


After...

Thursday, October 26, 2006
Argh!!! She mixed the play-doh
Thank God she didn't roll it around in the dirt and then eat it. BUT. I suspect she did eat some. I'm pretty sure I saw her chewing when I came back into the room. I asked her if she ate it and said EEEEEW! She said no, "I didn't eat it." So I settled in to play with her and every two minutes or so she'd pop up "I didn't eat it." LOL, so she must have.

In the first picture she's imploring me to make "moons." In the second picture she's laboring mightily to smash the moons.


An encounter with a stranger...
Emma and I spent some time at the mall yesterday. I took her to the open area with the benches so she could run around and burn off some energy. This little fella, C, came along. He was very interested in Emma seeing his new baby brother, T. Emma did look at the baby and comment. Then C was showing Emma the plants. He liked to get right up in her face. She gets a lot of that. In the picture she is playing shy and coming to Mommy.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Quick news hit
I'm at Noni's getting ready to drive home. M just called to say that the power is out there so if you don't hear from me again tonight I wasn't able to get on at home.

We had a fun shopping day, just Emma and me. I came over to buy her two pairs of shoes and ended up with three. I have no idea how that happens. She also got the cutest sweater that just jumped in our cart. I told the sweater that I don't spend that much on kid's clothes, but the sweater gave me a pitiful look and asked me if my precious pooh wasn't worth it. Damnit! So I had to get matching pants and shirt too. My pooh is sooo worth it ;)
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
A new weapon...
...has been added to Emma's arsenal to be deployed for maximum tantrum effectiveness. The piercing scream. Oh Lordy. So I ask myself, do I react to it or ignore it? At home it's easy to ignore it. I'm afraid shushing her or yelling at her to stop will only prove that it's an effective weapon. I haven't had it happen in public yet so I'm not sure if hearing it in a public setting will cause me to wet my shorts or not. We're going shopping tomorrow. Say a small prayer for me that I don't find out. Thanks.
She really likes her playdoh
The game tonight was that first I had to make them into "moons", then she picked which ones she wanted me to squash flat, then she stacked them, then she arranged them on the table. You can see her working on her arrangement...


Monday, October 23, 2006
Decorating for Trunk or Treat
If you were referred by a search engine click on the Trunk or Treat page I created with the information listed below....Trunk or Treat Decorating. You will find more pictures on the web site.

OK, since I'm getting so many hits for this anyway, as a public service I'm going to throw out some ideas from what I saw last year...

There are the obvious choices, like decorating for Halloween, using pumpkins, spider webbing, spiders, brooms, bats, cauldrons, scary stuff...

NOTE: Some church sponsored trunk or treats ask that participants not use scary items, like blood, bats, witches, spiders, monsters, or gore. It's a good idea because some of the best fun will be had by preschoolers.

The best way to go is to pick a theme. Think of it like dressing yourself in a costume. Sometimes you pick a theme and throw things together. Some of the trunks that stand out in my mind from last year were:

An SUV which was '70's themed. They threw down some shag, hung a disco ball and parked close to the church so they could run an extension cord to a light ball. The people wore 'fro wigs and tie dye. It was pretty funny. So you could do 50's, 60's or 80's too.

One lady was Mother Goose and had a few little settings around the trunk representing different nursery rhymes.

You can dress as a clown and fill your trunk with balloons.

Another one was a zookeeper who had lots of stuffed animals set about.

One acted like their trunk was the back of a boat. They had fishing poles for hooking the candy. (I actually recommend against activities like this because they hold up the line pretty badly)

Other ideas:
Beach theme. Noni might do this with the Patrol this year. Open up the back, hang some towels and set up a boogie board against the door, set out beach chairs, use an umbrella. There are tons of things you could do with this. I told Noni she should wear her bathing suit over her clothes. I think the kids would think that's a riot. She doesn't want to, but someone should do it.

NASCAR Theme
Harvest Theme
Sports Theme (pick a sport)
Popular Kid's Themes: Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer, Veggie Tales. (If you have kids and they're into a particular character you can use their stuff. Other kids will love it)
Animal Themes
Movie Themes (Keep the kids in mind though)
Western Theme
Camping Out theme
Gone Fishing Theme
Pirate Theme (Decorate like your local Long John Silvers or Red Lobster!)

Links with more ideas:
www.touchandchange.com
Clear Lake Methodist Church
Bible Baptist Church Second Annual Trunk or Treat
Jacksonville's Second Annual Trunk or Treat
Elm St. Baptist Church


Noni and Popi with motorcycle last year.


A spider pumpkin we made as decoration and set next to the cycle.



If anyone has any other trunk decorating ideas please post them in the comments and I'll add them to this post for posterity (and searchability!) Feel free to leave links too!
Instead of the foliage update...
we have snow! It never got above freezing today. Yuck, I'm not ready for this. The forecast has a winter advisory telling us we could get an inch or two by tomorrow. I'm reeeeally not ready for that!

Under the gun
For a silly reason. A friend gave me a birthday gift; a very generous gift certificate for a dinner out. She envisioned us hiring a babysitter and having a quiet evening out, just the two of us. There was enough money for appetizers, wine, dessert, the whole nine yards. Friday we heard that the place where she had bought it was closing down this coming weekend. Yikes! And they're usually closed Tues. - Thurs. We're busy Fri. and Sat., so that left tonight or Sunday.

We tried to go there tonight. It's their buffet night. We were going to take Grandma because buffet night doesn't cost as much and we needed her help burning the whole gift certificate up. She couldn't come so it was just M and me and Emma. We got there and they were full; we apparently should have had a reservation for buffet night. I think their own business model might have done them in.

I went in and talked to the owner. I explained to her that they had sold this gift certificate just last week and now we had no time left to use it. She graciously offered me cash from the till for it. You better believe I took it. I would have preferred a gift certificate from the Inn anyway. They have a crab dip appetizer that's to die for.

We ended up schlepping down to the local greasy spoon, which was the only other restaurant open in town on a Monday evening. We'll save the Inn for later.
Me, being mean again
I wanted to capture a better picture of Emma in this outfit, which was a gift from Leslie in our mommy board birthday exchange. Better picture means no paci. Emma was highly upset at giving it up for my photo. You can watch the drama unfold...



Sunday, October 22, 2006
Three Little Jacks
M got an itch to carve some Jack-o-lanterns tonight. We're trying to save the big ones for next weekend so we worked on two Baby Pams and a Jack Be Little. He carved the one on the left and I did the two on the right. Emma thought the whole process was pretty entertaining. It's hard to carve tiny pumpkins like that.


We stuck Emma in the picture to give you an idea of scale.


Not satisfied with that, we put the Coke can in to give you a better idea :)

New toys, new mess
What really got my goat was when she started flinging the mega blocks across the room. Grrrr.