Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The REAL Halloween

Every blogger must be trying to post Halloween pics today because I had the hardest time getting these loaded. Finally, after the 3rd or 4th attempt, here are ours.

Our family home evening activity on Monday night was pumpkin carving.
Die, pumpkin, die!


I think this was Brandon's first year
of "gutting" the pumpkin. He thought
that was pretty cool...and disgusting.



We usually print templates off the internet
to carve. We picked this cute happy face for Whit.



Brandon picked his own--a gecko.
What could be more Halloween-ish? :)



They both turned out pretty cool,
especially once we lit them up.

I think we have the perfect-sized block for trick-or-treating.
In the past, we've just gone around it once and that's been
more than enough candy for my little munchkins.


Whitney didn't even make it all the way
around this year! Is she the only kid in
the country who was done trick-or-treating
before her parents? Andrew went home
with her to pass out candy.



Brandon and I made it all the way around.
Oh, yeah! That's quite a stash. He is SO excited
about it. I am afraid he may get his first cavity
after this!

To the other parents of young kids out there, what do you do with your kids' Halloween candy? Let them have free reign? Limit it? Get rid of it after a few days? If it were up to me, I'd give the kids like 3 days to have as much as they wanted and then throw the rest away. (Actually, a friend at church told me that he raids his kids candy bags and saves some of the best candy to put in his kids' stockings--way to multi-task!) Andrew gets sentimental about it, though. He says that saving his Halloween candy for months was one of the best parts about childhood. (His dental records support my theory about cavities.) Anyway, he won't let me trash it....yet...we'll see what happens in the next week or two.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you should let the kid do whatever he wants with the candy. My parents let us have complete control and it always seemed to work out. My sister would save her candy for years. My brother would eat all of his candy within a few hours. I was somewhere in between. It seems to me that throwing your kid's candy away would be too tragic. That's like burning their Christmas presents a week after Christmas.

Anonymous said...

Put all candy in a well-wrapped box and send it to your dentist.

Anonymous said...

Great Pumpkins! I was having trouble updating our blog yesterday too. I'm going to agree with Dave and the candy. Maybe steal a few pieces for yourself and hide a few for later, but let them have the bulk of it. It'd be interesting to see if they're the type that would save it or eat it all at once. Besides, it's just baby teeth. (-:

Ang said...

The Sweats seem to agree that you shouldn't throw away the candy. What I usually do is let them have it in an accessible place for the first day or two, then I take the pumpkins and put them up high somewhere so they have to ask to get at it. Although I wish I did this for reasons as noble as health and dental fortitude, it's mostly because I can't stand having them 1. spoil their appetites for dinner and 2. leave wrappers all over the house :-). But I wouldn't throw the candy out completely.
I couldn't post very easily yesterday, either! And I thought it was just my dumb computer.
Cute pictures!
Ang

Sandy said...

I couldn't post until today, either...your pumpkins are really cute (way, way cuter than ours...as you can see on our blog). I don't know what to do about the candy...my kids didn't get that much, but they're still pretty little and can make themselves sick eating too much. I tried putting it on the piano and rationing it out, but I came around the corner and found Heather standing on the piano bench with a full, chocolatey mouth and wrappers on the floor all around her this morning. Oh well. I'm still searching for the perfect solution, too:) I think hiding the candy from mom is probably the biggest challenge...

Anonymous said...

I LOVE the gecko pumpkin! What a great idea to get the patterns off the internet.

Here's the thing about today's world....we have everything in excess. If my memory serves me, you probably got half as much candy when you were a little girl. Am I correct? Now there is so much, it's just nuts. I wouldn't throw it away because I think the kids know exactly what they got, but I would definitely ration it - I'd even take half of it out and tell them this is going into "food storage" and then pull it out for April Conference!

Love you,
Mom

Okay - I just typed my name in for the heading and had my hands on the wrong keys and it came out "Nine Inch Nails" instead of MOM so I left it there just for fun!
xo
:) (that's for Drew)

Laurie said...

I posted a couple ideasa about what some bloggers are doing with candy. After seeing on the Today Show that a typical pumpkin bucket full of candy equals 175 sugar cubes or 6 sticks of butter I decided I should try to limit C. It's hard though - it is fun.