Funny and Hot Wheels

We got up early to do our pumpkin carving. The kids picked out a face online and Andrés drew them freehand. The pumpkins this year weren't totally orange, but they had a really nice shape. They were really thick, too, and I got tons of seeds out of them. Fresh pumpkin seeds - a childhood favorite of mine!

So, meet Funny (Nico´s pumpkin) and Hot Wheels (Agustín's). Those are the names they choose for their special guests.

The whole Hot Wheels thing is very reminiscent of Hannah's Soda dollies, since Tin seems to want to name everything "Hot Wheels".

Happy (Early) Halloween!

Ding dong. The doorbell rang around 7 p.m. tonight. Shoot! I forgot about Ecuadorian Halloween (haha, this just means that the kids in the neighborhood trick or treat whenever they get the inkling - at 2 in the afternoon, two or three days before Halloween, or even the day after Halloween!).

I handed out some stale candy I had in a cupboard, as I was totally unprepared. It was really nice, though, that some of the kids asked if mine could go out and trick or treat.

Nico was in Superman pjs, so he was ready, but Agustin was only in his school uniform. Oh well, he went out as a school boy.

The kids loved running from house to house. Nico was a little crazy, running all over the place - he didn't even notice me there. That is, until he fell and scraped his knee and put a hole in his pjs. Oh well. Those are the perils of Halloween!

Happy Halloween

We missed Halloween, since, for some reason quite unknown to me, the neighborhood decided to celebrate it on Sunday afternoon. I didn't realize my mistake (silly me, thinking the trick-or-treating would take place today) until the doorbell started ringing nonstop at 6 pm on Sunday afternoon. I had to play the evil witch and pretend like no one was home since there was no candy in the house (and that is true - NO candy. Note to self: need to get to supermarket). Anyhow, last night I carved a green pumpkin (it was orange on the inside) into a cyclops face. Agustin was quite frightened and then offended this morning when he saw his jack o' lantern had only one eye. He told me to get another eye on him or throw the whole thing out because he wanted it gone when he got home this afternoon. And that pumpkin took me all night! Sure hope he has a change of heart when he sees it all lit up...













So Buzz Lightyear and Mickey Mouse will probably not go out tonight. But no fear, we got the cute pictures and, if that's not enough, look at the resemblance here... Now, can you tell who's who?









Saturday they got a little taste of a Halloween party at the Harvest Festival. Here we are with some others from playgroup.

Halloween Update

A little while ago the doorbell rang.

“The cable guy, finally!” (As Andres says, the bill knows how to reach us, but when it comes to installation, suddenly the company has no idea where we live!)

The doorbell rings again. A very insistent cable guy.

Open the door. It looks as if a tornado has hit. Jack is rolled over, face down, leaking candle wax all over the stoop as if he were bleeding to death. Candles slowly sputter out on the cfement step. Our solar lights which line the walkway have been knocked over and kicked around. Tufts of grass are pulled up and thrown around the sidewalk leading to the street.

Vandals, you say. Actually, no. Just over zealous trick or treaters!

Yes, there were about twenty kids swarming the door, begging for candy. they had no idea what to say, and only a few were dressed up (I saw a witch, a cat, and a big ugly monster) but there they were! Of course I had to dig around for candy. Luckily I found a bad of Safety Pops, which just happened to be from Halloween last year, but the kids got SOOOO excited to see a different kind of candy that they went crazy! So, Amy, I got to be that house too! How exciting.

So now we know for next year that we will go trick-or-treating. Tin is already talking about it. (It’s going to be a long year...)

PS I will add pictures to the previous post tomorrow at work. For some reason I still can’t add pictures from home. Bummer. Oh, and the cable people finally did make it. And we got cable in our room! Uh oh, I can see now that going to bed early is going to become a thing of the past, and it will get harder and harder to wake up at 5 am...

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

I’ve never missed being away from the Halloween celebrations back home - until I had kids. Now I think of how they’re missing a magical day - a day to be whatever you want to be, a day to dream, to feel a part of a larger whole, to become part of a community, and - let’s not forget - a day to get sick on candy!

It may seem like a romanticized view of Halloween, but Halloween is that day. A community sharing and participating, a city-wide, country-wide celebration, a day to be someone or something else, and to create. I feel bad sometimes that I’m not giving that to my kids, as part of their cultural heritage. Of course there are many Ecuadorian holidays, but I want them to experience both.

So last night we carved a pumpkin and roasted pumpkin seeds. The pumpkin was grown in Grandma Susy’s pumpkin patch in Calderon, from seeds bought in the U.S. last summer. It didn’t get very big, but the kids didn’t mind (know). They had a blast. Tin even helped poke out the design with a nail. We put “Jack” out on the stoop to get comments from the neighbors - some criticism, some compliments, but who really cares anymore?



After our pumpkin carving experience there was a firework show that could be seen from our house. I still have no idea why there were fireworks, but when Tin heard the noise he asked me where it was coming from. It was foggy out at that precise moment, and, not seeing the firework display, I told him I honestly did not know.

But he did.

“They’re dinosaurs,” he announced. “They’re stomping around with their big feet. Boom. Boom. Boom” He walked around the house like a dinosaur for a few minutes.

“Do you like dinosaurs?” I asked, expecting an emphatic yes!

“No,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “They have big toes. Yuck.”

Well. So dinosaurs have big yucky toes, do they? Hmmmm.

(On another note, tonight we get a cable connection in our bedroom. Yay! Happy Halloween to us. Hello, Jay Leno, Desperate Housewives, Big Love and the news! Goodbye soccer and Mexican telenovelas!)