October Fun

I am quite sure we have the most fun in autumn. We love apple picking, hayrides, corn mazes and pumpkin carving. Over the past week, we have had quite a bit of autumn fun. 

After listening to much begging, I finally let the girls decorate for Halloween last weekend. I put up a few fall decorations at the beginning of October, but I had not allowed anything that was clearly Halloween. It just seemed too early. After neighbors began putting up their Halloween decorations, I relented. 

Each year, we add a few new Halloween items. Our favorite this year is a giant spider that we put amidst our spider webs. The spider webs have been a constant part of our decorations for six years now, despite the fact they are so annoying to put up and to take down. I bought our skeleton last year on sale. This year, Meg was inspired by Hamlet (seriously, she was quoting Hamlet as she decorated) and posed him with another skull in his hand. 

After decorating, we headed to the Fall Heritage Festival at the Gulf Branch Nature Center in Arlington, Virginia. I talked about this festival in my previous post here. While there, Anne and Clare painted pumpkins. The festival always provides fun supplies for decorating pumpkins. This year the girls used Sharpies, pipe cleaners and googly eyes. 

For an extremely different experience, we left the woods behind the nature center and drove to Northwest D.C. for a pumpkin carving party on a friend's rooftop deck. The girls had so much fun carving these pumpkins. People brought fantastic carving tool sets for intricate pumpkin carving and the girls made full use of these tools. My favorite was a drill attachment that scraped the inside of the pumpkin clean.