The Sweetser Family: cookies

Cheese! Look at me working on a pumpkin!

Halloween fell right on the heels of Jude's birth, but we managed to do a remarkable number of activities to celebrate the season. I'd done a bit of planning in advance, which helped (Jude's due date was after Halloween, so I'd been expecting a bit more time to do Halloween activities), and I think I must have been running on complete adrenaline at that point. I'm not sure how we did it all, in retrospect. Apparently, Ben and I do a pretty good tag team.

I follow quite a number of blogs with kids' arts projects and frequent Pinterest as I have time, so we settled in at the new home by making pumpkins with tissue and contact papers (one set of instructions is available here). It seemed a pretty simple project we could all enjoy together and skill-appropriate for Jonah. He enjoyed playing with the tissue paper for a while, but lost interest pretty quickly. He probably would have had more fun picking the tissue paper off the floor or ripping or crumpling it. Sigh - maybe some day I will have a child who wants to do crafts with me!

All three pumpkins hanging in the window of the play room.

On the day that we brought Jude home from the hospital, we learned that the neighborhood trick-or-treat was that evening. We'd missed our old neighborhood trick-or-treat the prior night and weren't certain what to expect in the new neighborhood. I'd picked up a shark costume for Jonah in August or September in a resale shop, recognizing a good deal when I saw it (plus the selection was great because Halloween was still so far off).

Jonah had seen the costume and was excited to wear it, even refusing to take it off one Saturday morning in September while we ran a few errands. When it was time to go trick-or-treating, however, he refused to put it on and threw a tantrum. Finally, we told him it was his last chance if he wanted to go out to trick-or-treat and he decided that he did (though still with a few tears, as you can see here).

I'm still not so sure about this trick-or-treat thing.

He chose me to walk around the neighborhood with him (lucky me!), and we went down 116th and 117th Street, where there really were surprisingly few houses participating in trick-or-treat. Whether they were also caught off guard about the date (the notice appeared in our box that day) or this neighborhood is more bah humbug about the holiday, I cannot say. It wasn't like Jonah needed a lot of candy or we needed to be out in the cold for too long, so it was not necessarily a bad thing.

Watching a movie in his costume.

I'd encouraged Jonah to try to make shark sounds upon answers to doorbells, but that didn't go over with him. So then we worked on saying "trick or treat." This worked pretty well, with the exception of one house, where he sang "happy birthday" for them. Nothing like getting things a little mixed up for a laugh! Perhaps by next year, he'll have the routine down!

We'd talked up hot chocolate upon his arrival home, so he was excited about that, and we also let him watch a short movie on TV (I think we probably watched Dr. Seuss' Sneetches or something similar). At that point, he wasn't too interested in removing his costume, as you can see in this photo at right.

Posing with the pumpkin he selected.

The following day, we decided it was time to carve the pumpkins we'd picked up at Basse's weeks earlier (and had moved from our old house to the new). Last year, we picked pumpkins and thought that Jonah would be interested in carving them, but he wanted absolutely nothing to do with the process and even refused to stick his hands inside the pumpkin. As a result, we weren't quite sure what to expect this year.

We needn't have worried, as Jonah was very interested in checking out pumpkin innards this year. Perhaps it helped that I marketed them as "pumpkin guts." Perhaps it helped that we had some new little tools for cutting from Target that looked appealing to a little boy. Perhaps it was just a better afternoon nap and a year's growth. Jonah was definitely interested in using the little scoop to get inside the pumpkin and we asked his input about how we should carve the face. Obviously, he was too little to use the sharp tools, but he requested a jack o'lantern with "a creepy mouth with sharp teeth." That took a little clarifying - we drew some examples on paper, as you don't want to get a temper-tantrum-prone 2-year old's vision wrong, believe me - and we ended up with two similar looking pumpkins.

What's in there, Mommy?

Scooping out the seeds.

Posing with the finished products.

After we finished carving the pumpkins, we let Jonah have a piece of candy from his bucket. He chose the Reese's peanut butter cup (there's a boy after my own heart). He'd never had one before, but I think he liked it:

Hmm... first bite (and a BIG one).

This thing is pretty awesome!

Cutting out a bat for Halloween.

One of my goals for my time home on leave was to try to do some fun activities with Jonah on the days he is home from day care (we are continuing to send him 3 days a week to give me time alone with Jude and to give Jonah time with his friends and activities that would be difficult for me to supervise by myself with a newborn). I feel like I did a better job with that goal early on, before the Christmas holiday preparations began in earnest. At any rate, we cut out and frosted some Halloween sugar cookies to take to Jonah's teachers and the staff at the day care center.

Everything is easier with a tongue hanging out.

We've made cookies together before, and Jonah has naturally become more active and helpful in the process. For whatever reason, he enjoys eating the flour used to dust the work surface (he calls it sugar sometimes). He also tries to sneak hunks of cookie dough into his mouth, often giving us a knowing and taunting look before doing so because he knows he isn't supposed to be eating it. Watching where he puts the cookie cutter in the dough isn't a priority yet, so it's easy to end up with partial cookies and a lot of wasted dough in each rolling. We'll get there with time, I'm certain.

We frosted cookies after Jonah's nap and I let him have an avocado knife to frost one on his own. He went right to it spreading on the frosting and finished frosting one before really starting to get his hands into his mouth. I got out some chocolate chips to let him help with putting eyes, noses, and smiles on the pumpkins, and he did that for a while, but we had to stay right on top of him because his hands were constantly going back and forth between the sweets and his mouth. In the end, we just let him decorate a few cookies of his own and isolated them from the remainder.

Putting on a chocolate chip mouth.

The final Halloween activity in which Jonah took part was the costume parade they hold at day care. The kids bring their costumes and walk down Wisconsin Avenue on the Marquette campus (or they are pushed in buggies if they are too little to walk). My understanding is that they have done this for years and years and that sometimes employees in buildings along the way will pass out candy to the older kids. We took in a fair amount of candy for this purpose as we overbought, not knowing how poor trick-or-treat attendance would be in our new house.

Showing off his costume at daycare.

Jonah was much happier about wearing his costume for the day care event, which Ben stuck around campus for. I imagine this is the last year I'll be able to pick out Jonah's costume for him. I wonder what he might choose for himself next year and whether I'll have to help construct something to make his costume happen. Time will tell!!