Pumpkin Carving and Halloween (or Lack Thereof)

On Tuesday night, we decided to carve our pumpkins.  It was so hard finding pumpkins this year because we waited too late to get them.  Every time we thought about getting them, the stores were all out.  We were super lucky that the commissary got a big load a few days ago. The second I saw them, I grabbed a cart with Monster and bought them.  He was very excited to pick out the biggest pumpkins he could find.

All the kids were extremely excited to carve pumpkins tonight. We laid down some newspaper, got all our carving stuff out and let everyone pick what design they were going to do for their pumpkin.

Gutting the pumpkins is always the worst part.  Little A and Monster didn't want to touch the guts, and made Kevin and I do it.  Big Sis and M&M were gagging while they were gutting their pumpkins.

Big Sis and M&M made their own design to carve out.  They were super creative and worked super hard on getting their pumpkins perfect.

Big Sis designed a big spider and M&M designed a dragon.  I had my doubts that the designs would work, but they both surprised the socks off me with some stellar pumpkins.  I am super proud of them  and their super awesome creativity.

On Halloween, the kids were allowed to wear costumes to school.  It's been a long time since the kids were allowed to even talk about halloween at school, let alone dress up, so they were so super excited to dress up.  M&M dressed up as a spider web and Little A was a flying unicorn. It was fun waiting at the bus stop in the morning and seeing all the kids dressed up for Halloween.  There was such an energy of excitement in the air.

Kevin and I had a long discussion about what to do for Halloween tonight and trick or treating.  The Germans don't celebrate Halloween and don't do trick or treating, so the only option we had for the kids was to go on base and go around to the onbase housing.  I was told that the base gets super crazy and way over crowded.  We didn't really want to spend the time driving to base or walking around on base just to get candy.  We talked to the kids and as a family we decided to have a fun family Halloween Dinner, with spooky stories.  Kevin helped me make spooky eyeball spaghetti.  The kids went crazy over it and super loved it.  We also picked a family Halloween movie and watched "Casper the Friendly Ghost", while eating ice cream sundaes and popcorn.  To make up for not trick or treating, we took the kids to the store and let them each pick out two bags of candy.  All the kids said it was one of their most favourite Halloween nights.  It really was a super fun and great family night.