Better Late Than Never, Right?

We didn’t get to carving pumpkins this year. The kids each got to pick a pumpkin at our field trip to the petting farm, and while they were quite content with this size of their pumpkins, they weren’t exactly jack-o-lantern material. I am sure we’d have had to pay a trip to the ER if we attempted to carve such small pumpkins. I kept holding out for a trip to a “real” pumpkin patch, but it just wasn’t in the cards this year.

The day before Halloween I was trying to scheme a way we could run to the grocery store and get a bigger pumpkin, as well as carve it in between our neighborhood trick or treating event at the shopping plaza and our visit to Scott’s parents and grandpa to let them see the kids in their costumes. It just wasn’t happening. Sure we could have cut the visit with the grandparents short and forced the kids to stay up past their bed times to make it work. And if the kids had really wanted to, it might have been worth it. But I was reminded of an important lesson as we enter this holiday season. You can over do it with good traditions. And while traditions are fun and important, sometimes you just gotta enjoy the moments you have instead of trying to cram more in.

So I let the jack-o-lantern go this year.

The kids weren’t asking about it so I let them just enjoy the candy and costumes and saved the pumpkins for another time.

But, the day after Halloween my son remembered. “Hey Mom, we never carved our pumpkins this year!”

Time for plan B.

I said, “I think we’ll paint out pumpkins this year.” Who cares that it is after Halloween? Pumpkins are fallish, right? So, one day this week when the kids woke up from their naps, we had a little craft time. I scrambled around for some paint and sequins and covered the table in newspaper. The only paint I had around didn’t have “washable” printed on the bottle, so please excuse our mostly naked shots as I wasn’t willing to sacrifice their clothes for this craft.

I am really glad I didn’t over pack our festivities this Halloween. It didn’t matter to the kids that we painted our pumpkins AFTER Halloween. They still had a blast. And we have this fun, new decoration to grace our home this November.