Halloween is a funny holiday in Australia. Some people celebrate, some don’t.
Last year I noticed several houses in our street put out Halloween decorations to let the neighbourhood kids know that they were a trick-or-treating friendly house. Thus the hoards knew which houses to knock on and which houses to avoid (lest they end up being given a mouldy old apple by dear old Beryl Witherberry).
So when JJ (3 years and 3 months) begged me to buy saw this pumpkin last week, I thought it would do a great job of advertising our trick-or-treating friendliness to the neighbourhood. But of course it had to be decorated first! It’s the first time we’ve attempted pumpkin decorating. I asked JJ to draw on the pumpkin, similar to how we made our Orange Faces and Spooky Orange Faces. As we were gifted with some FooDoodler edible markers only a few weeks ago, I thought this would be a great first project to try them out.
Off her own bat, JJ decided to draw a “scary-funny” face. (Scary-funny is a term I coined last year to try to prevent Halloween nightmares, and it’s kinda stuck.)
She drew two eyes (with pupils) and a zig zag mouth. Then she walked around the pumpkin, drawing similar faces on each of the four “sides”.
JJ still holds her pen in a fist most of the time, so I’m looking for opportunities to work on improving her pencil grip, pre-writing skills and fine motor skills. This sort of play makes for excellent practise in a fun, unpressured and meaningful context.
After drawing the four faces, JJ decided that the pumpkin needed a zigzag around the stem area, and then started to draw little squiggles using each of the colours, before declaring the project finished.
I noticed that the markers took a second or two to dry, and so they smudged in places where JJ had touched them immediately after drawing. But otherwise they did a pretty good job.
And yay! We now have a cute quirky little pumpkin to decorate our front porch for Halloween!
I’m planning to take JJ and Bee trick-or-treating for half an hour or so along our street in the early afternoon, so I made this Please Take Just One sign so other trick-or-treaters don’t miss out while we’re not at home.
I’ll put it with a mix of lollies and non-food treats (including my spooky eye-balls) so kids can choose whichever they prefer.
And I also made this Sorry We Are Out Of Treats sign below just in case the demand is much higher than expected. I’m hoping that we don’t have to use it! This will be a worst case scenario – I think I’ll donate JJ’s collected treats to the cause before resorting to this…
Now it’s your turn. Are you Halloween-ing this year? How many people are you expecting to knock on your door? What are you dressing up as? Do you have any special traditions? And does anyone have a good post-Halloween pumpkin recipes
xx Danya
(PS: Just disclosing that we received these FooDoodler edible markers as a no obligation gift. All opinions are my own.)
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