Beesons at Bensons

The Beeson family took a trip to Benson's farm where we picked out our pumpkins. The kids had fun picking out their pumpkins as well as checking out the farm surroundings.

Brotherly Love

After a little teamwork, they felt a little brotherly love. They were posing like crazy so we continued our photo shoot.

Salt Dough Pumpkins

This was the boys' first time to co-chef in making a creation. It's become a tradition, just like making a gingerbread house, to make these salt dough pumpkins each year. It's as simple as 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of salt, and a 1/2 cup of water mixed with a little food coloring. You mold your creation, put it on a paper plate and heat them in the microwave at 30 second intervals until they harden. When they cool, we drew faces on our pumpkins. Ethan helped to twist paper sacks to make gnarly, leaveless trees for our scene. They were pretty proud of what they made.

A Pumpkin Mouse House

It's pumpkin carving time and I thought it'd be fun for us to make a pumpkin mouse house as a family. I sent Ethan and Drew on a mouse hunt (looking for rocks that look like mice) as I set up the table for the pumpkin innards. When they returned with handfuls of mice (seen in the bottom pumpkin picture on the right) we were ready to hollow out the house. You can see that Drew was very hesitant to touch the pulp and Ethan had quite the face as he touched it. Not what I expected for two boys. Eric dug in and helped separate the seeds for roasting (which I did later.) After the pumpkin was hollowed, Drew lost interest so that left Ethan and I to carve the house while Eric entertained Drew. Then Ethan and I went and trimmed some limbs off of our front tree to make sticks for the windows, door and stairs to the house. Once it was complete, we turned off the lights and lit up the house. Ethan invited Drew and Eric back to check out the creation. We didn't finish making the mice, but we'll add a tail and a few eyes in the next few days. We plan on making 1 or 2 more carved pumpkins. Maybe on Saturday. I was abandoned to clean up the mess myself. The boys were put to bed as the pumpkin seeds were roasting in the oven. Later, when I was finishing up cleaning the kitchen, I looked out onto the couch and it was down to one; Eric was asleep. So, I finished my evening with trying out my roasted pumpkin seeds as a snack.