'tis the night called Hallows Eve
Waylin has been really interested in drawing lately. She likes to sit on our bar stools and use a pencil to draw “poop, books, and cows". 💩📕🐄 It’s still up in the air as to whether she is a righty or a lefty. Ben likes to correct her whenever she uses her left hand, but I let her decide what feels the most comfortable to her.
Side note: I just love those baby curls!
This week, I’ve tried to be more conscious with my grocery bill and sticking to a meal plan to save some money. It’s actually been going really well, and I am excited to see how much I have saved at the end of the month! I’ve been cooking more bulk dishes which means I have free time to spend with Waylin while I let the casserole do its thang in the oven! We’ve been spending time drawing and playing with stickers.
I swear she is not a nudist, but she was feeling hot so I let her run around in a diaper, which she REALLY enjoys. I imagine its very freeing! Anyways, we were drawing at the table and she climbed out of her seat. I figured she was bored with this activity and ready to go play with something else. I turned around and saw that she was drawing a picture for Sampson (our fake dog) and showing him what she drew! I can’t believe I caught it on camera!
We had to rehome our dog Vader which was a really difficult decision to make. I never thought I would be a person that gave up on a dog. I think this is the first time I’ve even written anything about it because it still hurt to see him go to another home. Sometimes I think Waylin misses having a dog around. The two of them were really great together. For now, Sampson is a good boy! 🐾
One of the things that I have been trying to practice is to let go of the idea of perfect parenting. I know damn well I’m not a perfect parent, but I often find myself playing the comparison game. A mama friend of mine posted pictures over the weekend of their little girl carving pumpkins and baking cinnamon sugar pumpkin seeds. I instantly was like: I WANNA DO THAT!
Turns out, we didn’t carve our pumpkins until the night before Halloween. 🤷♀️ Aaaaand, we didn’t start until about 7PM, making us really limited on time! That didn’t matter to this little pumpkin. Look at her face! She was so excited to carve the pumpkins! She looks like she’s ready for a roller coaster! I highly recommend rolling out some old Christmas paper to make cleanup easy! I remember using newspaper as a kid, but that soaks through pretty quickly and is hard to spot for messes. Plus, it’s 2019, who is paying for a newspaper these days?! 😂
Her faces crack me up! Ben did a lot of the work in prepping the pumpkins for carving. He cleaned them up and was very careful with the stems. They were really prickly! These pumpkins came from my in-laws field this year! We hand picked them! You can read about that adventure here!
I think it is usually hit-or-miss when it comes to kids liking the idea of pulling out all the “guts” of a pumpkin. I couldn’t believe how content Waylin was with cleaning out her pumpkin. She wasn’t afraid at all, just very curious about the pumpkin seeds.
These two worked together to carve her pumpkin while I cleaned up the mess. At this point, we were less than 15 minutes from her bed time and she still needed a bath, so our pumpkins weren’t super elaborate this year. And that’s okay! It was a fun experience and next year, we will try to carve them on a weekend so we have more time!
As you can see, I didn’t even have time to carve my own pumpkin! 🤦♀️ It’s sitting on the left in the dark! #icallthatspooky
Another tip that I’ve learned as an adult is to use battery-powered flickering candles in your pumpkins! ALL THOSE YEARS in the 90s when my mum would be struggling to light our pumpkins against the wind/rain!
