Pumpkins!!

So this is the haul of pumpkins for carving fun this year! This has become an absolute must for the Halloween season at our house. John really enjoys it ( obviously it provides yet another creative outlet for him!) and so the kids have naturally followed suit. The pumpkins seem to be getting bigger every year.....

The cleaning out begins!



These are somewhat out of order(whoops) but this is John helping Cam get ready to poke out his outline.

Of course, half of the fun is just getting messy!

Kian joined in the messy fun too!

Here is Kian trying to put a picture on his pumpkin like he has seen the other kids doing and Mom is busy taking pics so she is not helping yet!
Tori showing us some pumpkin guts!

Here are the older kids punching out their patterns with dad's expert assistance!
I was lucky enough to get to "finish" removing the insides of most of the pumpkins! So now I will reveal the finished products! The kids pumpkins required adult help once they realized they had been a little ambitious in choosing their designs. They all gave it a really good effort though!


John did this one which was appropriately titled "Come Unto Me"
This was also Johns displaying the motto emblem for "Choose The Right"
This was Braxtons'(with some help!)

This was Victorias'(once again, with help!)
JJ completed his all on his own but there was some sadness when he accidentally cut out some areas that were supposed to remain intact. Not bad for doing it all on his own though!!
This was Camerons'(or Johns work, really, but Cam did pick out the pattern!
And this was Ashlees'! We never actually got around to carving Kians' pumpkin!


These are last years pumpkins I thought I would include in this post just for fun since we didn't have a blog last year to display them!





Looking forward to next year already!

Seriously???

I am going to preface this by saying that I wish these were unlikely occurrences at our house, but the truth of the matter is I was just finally so fed up that I decided I needed to take pictures for documentation. These two particular events that I have pictures for happened three days apart. I remember that JJ, Tori and Braxton went through a stage where they used to get all the boxes of wipes in the house and get on their top bunk and and pull them apart one by one and throw them to the ground below or go to the playroom where I had efficiently organized their toys into bins( cars w/cars, barbies and acc., puzzles w/ all there pieces, Etc.) and dump them all together into the middle of the room and then leave,as if that was the end of the game. Apparently it was. Annoying! It seems as though the younger group are trying their hand at this phase now and I just feel like I can not keep up. I'm not really sure what the answer is. Yes, they had to sit in time out and Yes, they had to help to clean up the mess. They even lost an opportunity to go to the Park for the second occurrence and we had a talk about what are other things that we can do if we are bored and need something to do. Cameron actually said to me when questioned about why they made that huge mess, " Well, we could not find you and so we decided to dump everything." Seriously???? For the record I was dealing with a an issue with ALL of my older children in the basement that took longer than expected. I guess it was to be expected, although I would really like to think that it is possible for them to do activities that are not destructive when left alone for 15 minutes. Is that an unrealistic expectation? O.K. at this point I am clearly rambling on about my frustrations so I will post the evidence. Unfortunately these pictures can not completely show the scope of the damage.
This is actually the second event but it posted first. The contents of the pile include,to name a few things, clean laundry( about 3 loads) dirty laundry ( yes I had to rewash some of the previously clean stuff since some of the dirty laundry was wet-enough said-?)random dishes, shoes, blankets, toys, and what you may not be able to clearly see is that an entire bag of fruit loops was thrown all over the room.

Ironically,or maybe not, I had cleaned the main level that afternoon.

Event #2 occurred in the girls bedroom just a few days before. Once again,ironically, or not, I had been doing a "mom" clean of the upstairs and was in my room finishing up when this happened. It is just not nearly as satisfying to organize bins and drawers the second time in the same day. UUUUGGGGHHHH!!

May I never have a post like this again. (Yeah, right!)

He still impresses me....

These are the latest of Johns' paintings.

It is interesting to me that it took this long for him to discover this beautiful talent of his! He's always been artistic, but his level of ability with oil painting for someone whose never done it before is pretty amazing in my opinion!

Many more to come..........

I am very behind on my blogging so I am hoping to make up for it by frequently blogging throughout the next week or so! We'll see how that goes!