Halloween 2021
Greetings and Trick or Treat to everyone!
Over the summer, we read The Hobbit and the three Lord of the Rings books.
While reading The Two Towers in late August, Xavier decided he wanted to be Treebeard for Halloween. He told Rebecca, and she rose to the challenge. We finished the book, then watched the movie and Rebecca took notes.
We bought some hunting camouflage pants and shirt for Xavier. Rebecca bought leaves and moss from a local craft shop and glued them to his pants and shirt. The hard part would be the head.
In the middle of building out the costume, Xavier decided he just wanted to be a tree. A little bit of a let down, but certainly the head piece became much simpler: a stocking cap with leaves and moss attached (which worked out nicely as Halloween night is cold, in the low thirties).
The costume turned out nice. Xavier easily could have passed himself off as a woodland pixie if he wanted to.
Xavier wore his costume to his school's Trick or Treat Street event on Monday. The event was well attended; the candy supply cart constantly passed us in the lines to restock the stations.
Rebecca set up and we hosted a Halloween party yesterday for Xavier's classmates. It gave the kids a chance to wear their costumes again, and for the parents to get to know one another better.
We bought frozen pizza and pretzel dogs for the kids and cooked chili for the adults. Rebecca and Xavier spent nights last week baking an army of cupcake spiders. They turned out fantastic!
Vanilla cupcakes, black licorice legs (which we had to special order because stores don't seem to carry licorice whips any longer) and black buttercream frosting for bodies.
Of course, we had to carve pumpkins. Xavier harvested six from his garden this year. We had to throw away two due to damage by squirrels and bugs.
Xavier sold two and left him with two to carve. I bought one at Costco, so we had three.
Xavier did his own design this year. He used his smallest pumpkin and worked out his design on the butcher paper we had rolled out on the table to work on. (his is the one to the right)
After carving his pumpkin, he went off to find something else to do. I had been carving my Costco pumpkin while he carved his.
I asked him, "What do you want to do with your other pumpkin, the big one?" He answered with something along the lines of "I don't care."
Well, I could not let a perfectly good pumpkin we had built a sprinkler system to water not live up to its destiny. We turned it into a simple cat.
Pumpkin Harvest 2021
Hello to everyone.
Over the last few weekends, we have been hacking away at the spent sunflower hoard overgrowing Xavier's garden.
After hewing down several trashcans full, and the cooler nights bringing the pumpkins' foliage to shrink, we can at last see this year's pumpkin haul.
It's a little disappointing after last year's record-breaking pumpkin harvest.
We do not know what the difference is. We grew two different varieties of pumpkin this year, but we started them in the house like last year.
Perhaps the soil needed more nutrients. It certainly got plenty of water due to Xavier's sprinkler system he and dad built.
It may be that the sunflowers shaded the pumpkins or competed for nutrients.
All in all, Xavier got six pumpkins. The two smaller ones were damaged by squirrels and snails.
The largest one this year weighed in at 36 pounds. The next one (the bumpy one) weighed in at 19.5 pounds. Number three weighed 13 pounds and number four apparently has no weight as the scale does not read it. That may be due to a battery issue with the scale.
Xavier already has two of them sold. He plans to keep the big one for carving and wants to sell the other to someone in the neighborhood.