Cookies, Park, and Pumpkins - Oh My!

Wow, I don't know what has gotten into me for the past couple of days. Maybe it's a bit of guilt for having left the kids for a week while we played in Maui. I have gone into overdrive thinking of fun stuff for the kids to do, and shoved it into two days. Things that normally I'd have done over the course of I dunno, 2 weeks?!

Yesterday while I was at the grocery store I got a wild idea to buy stuff to let the kids make and decorate sugar cookies. Pre-made dough of course. I'm not that crazy! Cousin Landon and Aunt Kim stayed with us last night so they joined in the fun also. Well, time was ticking away last night and at 8:00 we decided we'd put off the cookie making until in the morning. That would've been OK with the 2-year olds, but Collin wasn't gonna let it fly. So cookie baking it was. They smooshed pieces of dough out and cut them into various Halloween shapes. This morning we loaded up all the supplies and went out to the driveway on a sheet to let the kids go to work decorating them. It turned out to be quite a mess, but they had a lot of fun!

After decorating cookies, we headed to the church pumpkin patch to pick out some pumpkins to decorate. The kids had so much fun running through the pumpkin patch. Collin particularly enjoyed running from one side of the patch, jumping, and landing in a big pile of hay. Ainsley mainly wandered around checking out all the pumpkins.

Whoopsie! Poor Ainsley. This is a common occurrence for her.

After we left there, we headed to the Burger King drive thru and then on to Central Park. It was a gorgeous day for a picnic! We sat at a table close to the pond and about 5 minutes into our lunch, one of the ducks spotted us and our food. Collin was a little freaked at first. Ainsley just wanted to pet the poor thing. I think I must've had to tell her at least a dozen times not to touch the duck. It never tried to bite any of us, but Collin wanted it gone. At one point he said, "Go AWAY duck. We are CHILDREN!" We went over to the playground after lunch and the kids played until I knew they were exhausted and needed naps.

When they woke from their naps, it was on to pumpkin painting! Fun times. Because I am naive, I had pictured in my mind scenes of them painting only the pumpkins. Now, I did have the foresight to dress them in clothes that were "ok" to ruin. However, I don't think any of the paint touched their clothes. But it did make its way onto hands, feet, legs, arms and noses. The nose painting happened while I ran into the house to run bath water. As I was walking back to get them I heard Collin say, "Look Ains, I'm a clown!" And then I noticed the painted noses. So I soaked them in a bath of turpentine. Kidding. It was just warm water and a healthy dose of Lighting McQueen bath bubbles.

I need to get busy working on our Maui blog entry. But for now I leave you with this picture. I call this one "Princess Batman."