Pumpkin fun

Not a bad effort for a very distracted evening. Steve did the scooping while I nursed a grouchy Charley, and I carved while he cuddled a finally sleeping Charley.

The lego week continues. Steve and Ben went out on a hunt for a newspaper and the "free" lego, and discovered on their travels that pre-school is actually open over half term (I did not realise this, I should really pay attention and read the newsletters!) so he will be going tomorrow :)

And in the afternoon Vicki came round with her children, and the kids played and we drank tea and ate cake and talked about all sorts of things again and plans are afoot for the next tea&chat, this time with clay instead of cake - and we might actually get round to making some Christmas presents!

I did make a test batch of clay when she'd gone home. It's now sitting in a tub waiting to be used - it's a little wet so I might have to add a little more cornflour, but it's only a test batch so that's the point I suppose. Another recipe I found is for cinnamon ornaments, but the recipe calls for applesauce and a LOT of cinnamon, so I need to get making applesauce to test it in a small batch before going and ordering a crate of cinnamon.

About 10 minutes after Vicki left our first trick-or-treaters called, and I was totally unprepared!! Poor little girl, she had a fantastic orange witch costume on though. Rushed around gathering treats for future callers and three hours later our second and last trick-or-treater called. Ah well!

And then once the boys had fallen asleep (I won't use the words "gone to bed" as it's not an accurate description at all) we carved pumpkins and watched a really odd film about orchids. I used the lino cutters that my sister in law gave me for Christmas a few years ago - I'm going to lend them to a friend but I discovered that pumpkins are a great training medium for lino cutters! I only gouged my thumb once so I reckon given the last time I used lino cutters was about 13 years ago that's not bad going.