Halloween 2017

We've had several different fall festival/Halloween type events this year. The boys just picked a costume out of our dress up clothes before each event :) Here's some of our fall fun... 

the Crosspoint Fall Festival kicked it all off. the boys played/bounced for almost 5 hours!

We went to the last farmer market/Autumn Harvest market in downtown Greenville...  

 Then costumes to kids connection... 

 Then we had some friends over for chili, pumpkin carving and smores the night before Halloween... 

 Then we went downtown Clemson on Halloween...

 and stopped by for some more pumpkin carving later that evening... 

the boys have really enjoyed sawing/digging in our pumpkins! 

Halloween

We aren't big Halloween people, so I came up with the cheapest, easiest, use-what-we-already-have costume. I only bought the 77cents tool belt and we called it a day :) 

The kiddos all wore their costumes to music class this week and then G wore it again when we joined the rest of Clemson downtown at the Halloween Festival. 

And we also carved a pumpkin today... Go Tigers!

diwali + pumpkin party

On Wednesday night the Gainors invited us over for a diwali/pumpkin carving party. It was the actual Diwali day, so we knew there would be a lot of festivities and fireworks going on that night. Gray worked for a couple days finding us pumpkins to carve. He ended up finding a man to bring some from a village and this is what he ended up with... 

 Great job Gray!

The kids in the pumpkin patch

 The food was delicious! It was kind of like fair food (especially with the yummy caramel apples Brandy made) We had been reading so many posts on facebook and blogs about the fair and all of the food our friends had been eating, so this was exciting for us!

 Everyone worked hard to carve their pumpkins. It was really fun to carve pumpkins, especially since we enjoyed it so much last year. 

 Sarah and Paul

 us with our pumpkin

 All of the finished products

 After we carved pumpkins we went up to the roof to watch all of the diwali fireworks and set off some of our own. They used Paul's pumpkin to set some of them off.

We also walked around the Gainor's neighborhood and saw a lot of their neighbors all dressed up for diwali and setting off fireworks.

Thanks for hosting us, Gainors! What a great idea! 

You can also read Amy's blog about our celebration here. 

Halloween

Last night we did a neighborhood Halloween outreach. Our church had about 6 houses that participated. We headed over to the Harper's house for the evening. One of our friends, Ben headed the evening up. The idea came from George Robinson, one of Chad's professors at Southeastern. You can read the whole article here. The main thing he is getting at is that "Halloween is the only night of the year in our culture where lost people actually go door-to-door to saved people's homes".

The Mangum's also came over to Marshall and Rachel's and brought chili and hot chocolate. yum. Thanks Denny and Debra!

 I think Larry had the most fun out of everyone.

 Heather and Eric (or should I say Mr. and Mrs. Smith) came by.

- - -

BTW, just in case you were on the edge of your seat as to whether or not Chad got a fourth design on his pumpkin... he did! I never knew about etching pumpkins until Charity mentioned it, so we tried it on Saturday afternoon. We were watching the App Game on TV and so we tried to etch our favorite teams. Chad's (on the left) turned out better than mine. I think it is harder than it looks. 

pumpkin carving fun

Last night we had a little BYOP (bring your own pumpkin) carving party. I do not really ever remember carving a pumpkin (maybe once when I was around 10?) so I was pretty excited about it. 

My pumpkin was full of cheese. I should have taken a picture. It looked just like shredded cheddar.

 Adam and Ashley had a Tucker design they wanted to try. Tyler chose an Appalachian "A", I did our name, and Chad chose a spider design. 

Tyler worked so diligently and did a great job. We missed you Erin!

 Chad cooked some of the pumpkin seeds. 

The kind on the left= salted... pretty tasty. 

The kind on the right= brown sugar/cinnamon... fail. 

The finished products...

 Chad then decided he wanted to try some other designs... so he carved the other side of his pumpkin.

and then the other side... 

currently his pumpkin has 3 designs on it. I'm thinking he may try to get a fourth in sometime today :) 

 Ashley made some delicious cookies, we drank coffee, listened to Halloween tunes and had a great time! Thanks friends.