First Annual pumpkin patch

We found one! What a treat! Pumpkin patches are not common here at all but we found a local farm park who offered halloween activities and pick your own pumpkins.

This was our first outing with the cousins all together and I am hoping it is the first of many years of halloween fun to come.

I have dreamed my whole life of being two things. A Mum and an Auntie. The reality is so much better than I could ever have imagined. These kids are my kids and I could just burst.

Halloween 2010

It's been and gone already! Wow! We had a good time though and we were all well and happy which is a million miles away from Halloween time last year .

Choosing our pumpkins was good fun this year, K seems to be at a great age for really "getting" stuff this year. (can't wait til Christmas! woo!)

I told the kids that if they could carry them they could take them

Fraser swore he could manage this pumpkin. It would appear that it was almost too heavy for him, good thing he doesn't have an evil mum who would make him pose for pictures.......

Working hard

mmm pumpkin guts

my little pumpkin

K drew her pumpkins face with felt pen

and I cut it out for her

Happy girl

Fraser carved his all by himself, didn't he do great?

Happy pumpkins.

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This is the part where I need everyone to pretend that these are actually two seperate posts

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Of course Halloween wouldn't be complete without some costumes and some trick or treating. Although we call it guising here. Not sure why, must look into that.

Anyhoo , this year my twosome asked to dress up as their favourite characters from their favourite TV show.

K was a semi - aquatic egg laying mammal of action.

A furry little flat foot , who never flinched from affray.

She had more than just mad skill

she had a beaver tail

and a bill.

She was a platypus

perry the platypus!

But it wouldn't have been the same without her arch nemesis

Dr Heinz Doofenshmirtz from

Doofenshmirtz evil incorprated!

With his latest "inator"

Doo be doo be doo wah, doo be doo be doo wah

Agent P!

"Curse you Perry the platypus!"

While panicking and sewing furiously putting the finishing touches to K's outfit in the morning it was decided that there was one member of the family that still required an outfit

Emmy needed to be a pumpkin

and so she was.

I hope you all had a fabulous Halloween. We did. The kids had a ball and the most expensive and dangerous trick or treat bags in the world were stuffed full of treats for them to enjoy.

Finding treasure

"Come said the Wind to the Leaves one day.
"Come over the meadow and we will play.
Put on your dresses of red and gold.
For summer is gone and the days grow cold."

Halloween fail!

Do you ever start something and just know it is going to be a disaster? Do you ever continue on knowing the outcome will be even less fun than the journey? Do you ever look back in hindsight and see at least 10 different times where you should have called time on the activity and cut your losses?

I should have known. I should have seen it coming. But these pumpkin cookies that I saw on

Atelier Caroline were just begging for me to make them. And so I embarked on a baking adventure with my girl who had already eaten a bag of jellybeans AND was very tired AND was insisting on only wearing pyjamas. Mistake #1. 

The recipe called for sugar cookie dough. This isn't something we can buy here so I found a recipe in my favourite cookie recipe book.

Using an untested cookie dough recipe? Mistake #2.

Here is my PJ girl mixing eating the dough

The dough required 30 mins chill time in the fridge. Kirsten required 30 mins chill out time in her room.

We didn't have a pumpkin shaped cookie cutter so we improvised. I made orange and green cookie dough and we shaped some pumpkins.

I made too much cookie dough in my quest to make them orange AND green , so we shaped somewhere in the region of a million pumpkin cookies. Mistake #3

They were taking forever as I could only cook 6 on each tray because they spread! A lot.

By this stage it was past time for me starting dinner. My kitchen looked like this

And my daughter had unfortunately consumed even more sugar.

She also seems to have changed her PJs at some point! I only noticed just now! lol

The recipe called for white candy melts. We don't get those here. I figured white chocolate buttons would work the same Right? 



Wrong! Mistake #4.

The white chocolate burned and disintegrated. The orange and green dough ended up being slightly different shades of brown.

Check out the poor guy on the right of the pic!

He looked how I felt at this stage!

Surely now I would call it a day and just chuck them in the bin, ram the remaining chocolate buttons down my throat and start dinner. surely?

No. Mistake #5.

I decided to chuck all of the dishes into the sink and start dinner at the same time as baking the cookies.

Why don't I peel potatoes and melt chocolate at the same.

Mistake #6

I burnt the chocolate and 2 trays of cookies.

In the end I removed all of the burned eyes from the non burnt cookies. I threw all of the burnt stuff in the bin. I placed some new chocolate buttons onto the eye holes and melted what little of the chocolate I had left.

We ended up with something resembling pumpkin shaped cookies.

Mistake #7 came when we decided to taste them. Yuck. After 3 HOURS and all of the chaos they tasted of little more than cardboard. I willnot be using that sugar cookie recipe ever again.

"For all things.........................

                                         ........there is wine"  LeeAnn Peat Oct 2010