Pumpkin Carving 101...with Ben!

Maybe I can crawl in this thing...

Here Grandma, let me help you with this stem.

What an amazing carving Grandma!

The finished products

My mom and I carved pumpkins on Wednesday night for Halloween. Chris did the dirty work of getting us started by cutting the lids off and being on diaper duty with the little guy. We managed to get three pumpkins done and we were pretty impressed with our work! Ben wasn't too sure about pumpkin "guts" but seemed to enjoy playing with the pumpkin scooper tool after it was cleaned off. Bella had a little snack of pumpkin when we weren't watching her and Gaby did a good job of supervising our work.

I will be out of town at Penn State and Indiana for Halloween. Ben is having a Halloween party at daycare tomorrow and then he'll do a little Trick-or-Treating with Dad in the nieghborhood. Grandma Sharon is in town for 2 weeks and will be on candy duty at our house. We'll put his costume pictures up this weekend! BOO!!

Learning to Pet the Puppy

We are trying to teach Ben how to be "gentle" when petting Bella. He tends to get very excited when he gets close to the dog and/or cat and sometimes they don't quite appreciate it as much as Ben would like them to. Here are some of Dad's attempts at teaching Ben and also what happens when he corners Gaby!

Mom's Big Find at Work

I had a small crisis at work the other day when my wallet was stolen. Luckily, the police were able to recover it out of a dumpster in a building across campus! When I was outside waiting for the police to arrive with my wallet, some people were cleaning out a room in the Pavilion and there was an almost brand-new Radio Flyer Tryke just waiting to be taken home. I put it in the car and Ben was very excited to see his new toy! He's not quite big enough yet but he will sure have some fun next summer!

Big Eater

Ben has discovered that feeding himslef is much more fun than having Mom or Dad feed him. He likes to be eating whatever we are at the time and gets pretty adament about it. Tonight I made meatloaf and real mashed potatoes (as opposed to the instant variety that we have had in the past) and peas. We are not sure how much actually made it into his mouth as opposed to the floor, highchair, and Bella's mouth but he sure seemed to have fun trying!