Halloween Family Home Evening

To kick off the Halloween season, we had a special dinner and family home evening. Carston has been begging me to decorate for Halloween for the past week, so I promised we would do it together on Monday night. It was a lot of fun for me and for the kids. They were so excited to help pull out our Halloween decorations and to work on some crafts.

We had "mummy dogs" for our main course. A friend of mine started this tradition for our family. I quickly learned not to take all of my time making my own dough since the kids just peel off the bread and eat the hot dog. My favorite part is the bread, so it works out for everyone. We also had natural Cheetohs (worms) and peach Jello (it is orange so it works) that I covered in whipped cream. I scraped a jack-o-lantern into the cream to make it extra festive.

For dessert, we ate orange jack-o-lantern sugar cookies. I was planning on making pumpkin cheesecake but ran out of time, so we'll have that another night.

Carston asked what the ketchup was supposed to be in our meal, so we decided it was blood (as distasteful as that sounds). He asked for spaghetti with eye balls for dinner tomorrow night. Apparently, I am going to have to work on my repertoire of Halloween meals.

I love this picture of Jackson. He has this way of holding his mouth lately that you can see in this picture. He even does it when he smiles.

This is the beginning of a real Peyton smile. We don't see these very often on camera, so enjoy! One might note that Carston, Jackson and Peyton are still wearing their school uniforms. We went to a back to school night party last week with them still wearing their uniforms and found that they were the only kids there that hadn't changed. They don't seem to care, so I don't take the time to lay out different outfits. I'm sure that will change eventually.

Grant has kind of a sheepish look on his face because this picture was taken before the prayer. Carston was in the process of telling me that Grant had already started eating before we had the prayer. Carston is very conscientious about remembering to say a prayer before eating. It is really cute.

Benjamin started dipping everything he could think of into his ketchup. Here he is taste testing Cheetohs dipped in ketchup and gives it a thumbs up.

After baths, our family home evening lesson and a Halloween book, we worked on creating jack-o-lanterns from construction paper outlines I drew. Jackson valiantly attempted to cut his out, but finally gave up. I need to buy the poor boy some left-handed scissors! Last year at John Calvin Playschool, they told me Jackson had a lot of trouble cutting with scissors. I asked them if they were trying to get him to cut right-handed and when they answered that they were, I mentioned that he is a resolutely left-handed boy ( a fact I seem to have to reiterate over and over for people). Peyton had some trouble cutting as well, and she is definitely right-handed.

Grant, with his usual tenacity, insisted on cutting his own, but was only able to create patterns on the edges of the paper. He finally willingly gave his jack-o-lantern to me so that I could finish cutting it out. He glued the face on by himself and did a good job. He was pretty proud of it in the end, as you can see.

It was way past bedtime by the time we finished our family home evening Halloween festivities. I am not quite as quick at bedtime rituals without Mark. Oh, how we miss him! We had a fun night, though, and the kids were proud of their jack-o-lanterns. We were going to put together a skeleton as well, but will have to do it tomorrow night. We love projects at our house and there are so many good Halloween crafts to make that we might just busy ourselves each evening with one of them.
Happy Halloween season!