ghosts and pumpkins and things

I have had some one-on-one with both of my kiddos in the last couple days, and it has been such a treat. Ari and I built houses and baked and painted Halloween cookies and chatted and enjoyed each others company. Poor Dori is pretty miserable with a bunch of new teeth coming in, and though we had some good laughs today (bouncing on the bed is funny! Especially when mama flops down beside you!) he was pretty clingy and fussy.

Though with this one, you can pretty much always find a smile.

And though I think having time apart is good for the boys, they miss each other a lot. They were so happy to see each other today when Ari got home from "Baba Dedo day." They hugged and laughed, and Ari is even tolerating wet baby kisses now. Such sweetness to watch these brothers love each other.

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And we have decided to do a bit of Halloween this year. We adults are a bit ambivalent about it, but Ari caught wind of the costume thing and was pretty excited, though not so excited by the idea of randomly knocking on people's doors- that seemed to weird him out a bit. Plus, we don't really eat candy and are less than thrilled with hauling a bunch of it home. So we settled on going to a few houses of people we know and to invite the Switch Witch to come and trade in the candy for a few treasures (toy, book, toothbrush...) We are all good with this plan.

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And the costume part seemed a bit tricky- Ari was changing his mind constantly on what he wanted to be (a monster! a lion! a thunderstorm airplane!) and it seemed that nothing I made was going to meet the expectations in his little mind.

"I want to be a monster. Like raaaaarrrrr! Like that!" he's say. And I would try to tease out what raaaaarrrrr! looked like exactly.

"With claws?" I'd guess.

"No! Like rrrrraaaaaaaarrrrrrrr!"

Right. But in the last couple days he seems to have settled on being a ghost. I'm not sure what he imagines a ghost to be exactly, but I took out the elastic and cut some holes in an unused crib sheet and he is thrilled. Yay for that! Because thunderstorm airplane was going to take more creativity energy than I've got right now.

We'll carve out jack o'lanterns tomorrow. These little local pie pumpkins became pumpkin butter. Also known as "pumpkin pie jam" in our house. Yum. Happy Halloween to you all!