Mandalorian Pizza and a Creepy Clown

Tis the season! For skeletons and ghouls, that is. October always brings excitement at this age, and people really seemed to go all out this year in their yard decor. Our neighbor across the street loves this holiday, and the neighborhood kids love to help her put everything up and move it around every few days. This setup was all about COVID-sanitation. On nice afternoons, the kids and I have biked around to check out the nearby displays. We saw a skeleton COVID-race, badminton game, lawn maintenance crew, and rock band, just to name a few.

We even drove around one night, as some folks put up lights like it's Christmas! We came across this one, timed to music that we could tune into on the radio (a few song's worth at least), just in someone's yard. What dedication! (And an impressive electric bill, I imagine!)

It finally dropped to some pleasant temperatures and felt more like fall! We headed to a local pumpkin patch one evening for some photo ops and enjoyed the ambiance. Oh, and we also purchased a couple of pumpkins...

The kids wanted pictures with the goose gourds and octo-squash, too. Leave no gourd behind!

Kids love decorating their pumpkins! This year they each painted one and carved one. Owen was faithful to his theme. His costume was the Mandalorian, so he wanted to make a Baby Yoda pumpkin. With some cardboard ears and a paper bag body, I think it turned out pretty cute!

Hadley couldn't decide, so we scanned online for inspiration, and she saw a rainbow, melted-crayon pumpkin that called to her artistic side. Our crayons didn't melt down as far as the example, so we had a lot of white pumpkin space left. I suggested a clown, because of the rainbow wig, and H took that and ran with it. The scary face was all her own creation. P.S. Melting crayons is very messy and splatters everywhere!

I'm not really a fan of scooping out pumpkin guts, so I always make the kids do their own. It's messier this way, but it's only fair to spread the love. Tip: the ice cream scoop is perfect for this task. My hands were clean at the end! I also tried roasting some seeds this year. Verdict: they tasted like popcorn.

Here's the full family of pumpkins. Kids drew their designs, but I still do the actual carving part. Hadley finally decided on a BOO!, Owen went traditional, and I paid homage to the face mask, THE must-have accessory for 2020. We actually carved on Halloween. I wish we had done it a few days earlier, so that we could have enjoyed our creations a little longer before trash day. The carved pumpkins were cute, but Creepy Clown and Baby Yoda will hang around a few more days.

This Halloween was definitely different than usual. I wasn't going to do any candy handling or trick-or-treating, but changed my mind the day of. After all, we've had a sad, strange year, and why not try to have a little normalcy and fun where we can, especially for the kids. I didn't have a table, but we put down a little blanket with candy at the end of the driveway, and the kids supervised the passersby. We had less t-o-t-ers than usual, but more than expected.

We went very low-key on costumes this year. It was originally Mandalorian and Baby Yoda, but our neighbor was getting rid of this pizza costume, and Owen liked the combo. I asked them if they wanted to go trick-or-treat around the block, but Hadley told me, "We're getting to be too old for trick-or-treating, Mom." What? You're 8! But it was fine. Plan A was that I'd get them each a bag of candy, and we'd have a movie night. So, we did that. But we did give out some candy too. All in all, not too shabby!