Not What I Expected

That is, our first pumpkin-carving experience. I thought this was the first year he would truly appreciate this tradition. For weeks I've been oohing and aahing over my friends' adorable photos taken on family trips to the pumpkin patch.

The actual pumpking-picking-out event looked a little something like this in my head:

Unfortunately, life is busy. There are birthday parties and swimming lessons to attend, houses to clean, errands to run. So instead the pumpkin patch looked a little more like this:

Whatever, in the end, it's the gourd that counts.

He started off pretty excited about the idea of carving the pumpkin:



Then he got a look and a smell of what was inside the pumpkin:

Then guess who finished carving the pumpkin:

If no hookie-playing teenagers smash it today, I'll snap a picture of my creation this evening. Of course Amery takes credit for "his" jack-o-lantern.

Wordless Wednesday

Superman vs Spiderman vs A Different Kind of Robot

We've been asking Amery what he wanted to be for Halloween since about mid-September. He's in a superhero (he calls them "superzeros") phase right now, so naturally his internal debate has been between Superman and Spiderman. I was secretly hoping he'd choose the former, because then I could order this to match him. Superman was clearly the favorite, so I had high hopes. Finally, about two weeks ago, I asked him when he woke up if he wanted to be Superman or Spiderman. His answer was, "I want to be a robot." This was followed by his declaration to be a certain complicated Transformers-like robot he'd been carrying around for a few days. I told him I didn't think I could make that costume, so he would have to be a different kind of robot. Now if you ask him what he is for Halloween he will clearly tell you, "I'm a different kind of robot."

Armed with about 10 different homemade robot tutorials found on Pinterest, I settled on this version that uses a couple of aluminum roasting pans vs the traditional "cut a few holes in a cardboard box and hope your kid never needs to sit down or pee" version. I also knew he would never keep a helmet on his head for any length of time, so I cut apart a double-disco-ball headband from the costume store and made it into a single antenna headband using a regular old kid's headband from Target and some aluminum tape.

The small designs along the sides were some pre-colored printables from this site, but they have versions you can color yourself as well. I forgot to take a picture of the back side, but it's lined with reflectors I bought for about a dollar at Harbor Freight Tools. They function both as decorations for the costume and as safety items for trick-or-treating in the dark. I also plan to tape some glow sticks to the costume that night, but obviously they would lose their glow after a few hours, so I skipped that step thus far.

The final result, as recorded by my talented friend with her kick-butt camera skillz:


...an adorably sweet...


...different kind of robot.