Pumpkins, Leaves, and Halloween

Today has been one of those days. I knew Hazel would crash and it was just a matter of when. She woke up at 3 a.m. and would not go back to sleep for anything no matter what we tried. It threw us all off for the day. Sure enough I finally convince her to get dressed and go run errands around noon and she falls asleep about five minutes away from home. Needless to say the errands did not get done. So far she has been sleeping for two and a half hours and I slept for about an hour as well. But before she slept we did some crafts.

First we finished up a craft we had started the other day. Hazel wanted to do a craft when I was leaving so I suggested to Steve to paint coffee filters with her watercolor paints. Then we cut them into leaves. I saw the idea at Frugal Family Fun Blog.Then taking the idea from 1+1+1=1, we glued them onto a spiral to look like falling leaves. We also hung some of the leaves on the window to look like stained glass leaves. I love how the light shines through them.

Trick-or-Treat, Smell My Feet!

Hazel as Delia

Next we did some foam activities I had found in the discount bins. Frames and magnets for Halloween. Nothing too exciting. Then we did a cutting activity I saw on Mer Mag.  We started with pumpkins and then did ghosts and witches. We decided the two witches were the witch twins from Trick-or-Treat Smell My Feet! by Lisa Desimini.

Then we cut open our sugar pumpkin. Well we tried to cut open two, but one was not ripe and wouldn't cut. Hazel wanted to see if it had a star inside like the apple. She didn't want to touch all the strings, but loved putting her hands in the bowl of seeds.

We have been reading books about pumpkins. I posted about some from the library previously. We also bought two at a library book sale. The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons which goes into the biology behind growing pumpkins as well as the significance of them in Thanksgiving and Halloween. This book is written so a young child can understand it but also so an older child can get more from it. It includes how to plant pumpkin seeds and how to dry them from your pumpkin to plant them next spring, which we plan to do. We also bought Pumpkin Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington. This is about a young boy planting seeds and caring for the plant until he can harvest his pumpkin and have his parents help him carve it to be a jack-o'-lantern.

The Pumpkin Book

Finally another book to check out is All Hallows Eve: The Story of the Halloween Fairy by Lisa Sterlazza Johnson. It is another version of the pumpkin fairy. Although I like my version better, it is nice to have a story to read to Hazel at this age.