Pumpkin Carving and Painting

I love pumpkin carving and painting! That and handing out candy on Halloween night are some of my favorite Halloween things to do!

When I was a little girl, my Dad was a farmer. He would grow pumpkins to sell at the farmers market and my Mom would paint cute faces on them ... She would always do some for us too, and we would beg her to let us keep them as long as possible! Mine are not as cute as hers, but I still have a fun time doing them!

Ed loves to carve pumpkins. The last few years he and Matthew have found a fun carving pattern online and used that for their jack-o-lantern's face. Last years was a pirate/skull face that required using a drill to carve out each individual tooth in its spooky grin! This year they went a little simpler with the 'scary flame' jack-o-lantern.

Stadium Pal

I think David Sedaris is freaking hysterical ... One of my favorite sarcastic sites (Dooce) had a link to this video. I just about peed my pants laughing. I would buy one of these for my DH except I'm afraid he might use it!

Scrapbooking in the Poconos

My sister and a couple of friends went to a scrapbooking weekend in the poconos this weekend. It was so much fun and I was so productive! I made 24 pages! Also made 16 Christmas cards for a card swap we're doing.

I'm working on finishing up Matthew's albums... I printed out a bunch of pictures for the books I made him for his 7th b-day, but I wasn't able to get through them all. I might have been a little ambitious ... I printed out pictures from age 2 (the earliest pictures we have as we only have copies of the digital pictures and evil BM won't let Ed make copies of the film pictures) through age 6.5 ... a huge stack of pictures! So I' didn't finish them all in time for his brithday, but I'm still wading through them as he really loved his book.

Here are some of my favorites from the scrapbook pages I made this weekend:

Matthew's October Pack Meeting

Matthew's pack went on a hayride and pumpkin picking for their October pack meeting. Of course the event started at 4:30 and Ed's visitation doesn't start until 5:00. So he asked to pick Matthew up early and Kathy refused. She instead insisted on bringing Matthew to the event and handing him over to Ed at 5:00 when his visitation starts. It doesn't seem to matter to her that the judge told her that any time his father asked to have him early that it was her responsibility to give Matthew to his father early. Or that maybe it might have made it easier on Matthew to not have to transition between his parents in the middle of an event. She really doesn't care about anyone but herself. October is the perfect month for her ... she doesn't even have to dress up as she is a witch all year round.

Anyways .... here are some pictures from the pack meeting ...

Frugal Food

Below is an interesting website I came across in my search for a good recipe for green tomato salsa
www.hillbillyhousewife.com
There are lots of advertisements on it, but if you can tolerate that there are some good ideas for frugal eating. Also it had several amusing little rants/soapboxes. One regarding the merits of powdered milk and the other below a recipe for making Wendy's style Frostys at home without ice cream. V. interesting.