More fall fun

Amelia's elementary school hosts Pumpkin Day the Friday before Halloween. Each child is invited to bring a decorated pumpkin to display on the "pumpkin walk" around the school grounds. Since I am not much of a pumpkin carver I was happy when Amelia and I found this stick-on pumpkin decorating kit at Michael's when we were in Florida last month. Amelia chose the cat theme and the kids and I assembled the cat pumpkin a few days before Pumpkin Day. Below John is helping to trim the pipe cleaner whiskers that we stuck on the pumpkin's cheeks.
Below is a shot of Amelia looking adorable (and proud of her pumpkin!) on Pumpkin Day. I enjoyed meeting Amelia at her school for the Pumpkin Day picnic, where she showed me some of her favorite pumpkins that her friends had made. I thought her cat pumpkin turned out well, and I especially liked the way that Amelia staged her pumpkin. She found an old cat food bowl of Heine's that she displayed and we had gone to the pet store to purchase a small stuffed mouse to put inside the bowl. Amelia explained to me that the cat pumpkin was excited about catching a mouse in her food bowl. I thought this was cute.

Later that afternoon I met John at his school for the annual trick-or-treat parade. All the kids paraded through the church offices and gathered candy from church staff and members. Below is a shot of John at the after-party with some of his best buddies, all of whom were wearing Star Wars-themed costumes this year. To the right of John is Dylan, who was dressed as Darth Vader. Dylan has his hands on his little brother's head, who was also Darth Vader. To the right of Dylan is John's friend Ethan, who was dressed as Luke Skywalker.

And for one more October photo, here is another shot of Amelia and John from the day we went to the Arboretum. The kids were good sports that day as I made them pose with many pumpkins in order to get a lovely "fall" shot of the children. I am impressed by the way that John is actually looking at the camera here and of course I love seeing Amelia's dimples.

I took the photo of John below on Halloween Day when John was outside the back patio doors cleaning the windows. This one completley cracks me up because John reminds me so much of Scott's dad in this photo. Scott and I were cleaning up the house that afternoon since we were hosting friends for trick-or-treating later that evening and John wanted to help clean up too. John suggested that he could clean the windows outside (see post a few years back when he proudly cleaned all of my bathroom mirrors with Windex!), and Scott and I relented. What reminds me of Scott's dad in this circumstance is that they both enjoy doing physical chores around the house like this (in fact, I believe Scott's dad cleaned all of our outside windows voluntarily on one of his visits to Dallas), plus with the Miami hat and the concentrated look on John's face, he looks so much like Scott's dad George. I hope that John continues to love doing chores as that will come in handy as he gets older and is more coordinated to actually help around the house!