The Tapler Ohana: Fall 2011

I've been meaning to get these photos posted for awhile now and I have a few other things I want to post, but need to get these done first. So here goes. It's been a fun and full Fall for us around here! Dean got his craft on several times, painting and glittering mini pumpkins and even "mosaic-ing" (that's a Dean word) a pumpkin when he decided he didn't want anything to do with carving pumpkins because he didn't like the smell of the pumpkin guts once Daddy got started! And he even got into Trick-or-Treating this year, after a little bit of a push from us (although he did NOT want to wear a costume!).

One of the things Dean got the most excited about, but I was most disappointed in, was our painting pumpkins project. He had LOTS of fun with this and painted a few different little mini pumpkins.

I was a bit disappointed because even after trying several different types of paint I had on hand, nothing really seemed to want to stick to the pumpkins very well. Dean didn't seem to mind though and he spent quite a bit of time working on these. Finally I busted out some tubes of puff paint and that seemed to work the best.

A few days later we decided to glitter a few pumpkins. This was definitely my favorite project (and probably Dean's too!). It wasn't as messy as you'd think making them either. We first painted a nice coat of Mod Podge onto the pumpkins and then just sprinkled a ton of Martha Stewart craft glitter all over them! They turned out AWESOME!! Really, they look like something you'd buy in a home dec store! Dean LOVED this!

The day before Halloween we decided to carve some of the pumpkins we bought at the Kula Country Farms Pumpkin Patch. (actually this was Joel. I could really care less about carving pumpkins). As I said, Dean quickly decided he wasn't interested in this. Dean then decided ALL ON HIS OWN that he'd rather make a "mosaic" pumpkin. I wasn't too sure what this meant and there was a little bit of frustration on his part until I finally understood what he wanted to do. Then I helped him pick out some Halloween-ish paper from my scrapbooking paper stash and he got to work cutting it into small pieces and gluing the pieces onto his pumpkin.

He didn't really last that long - he only finished about 1/5 of his pumpkin, but it was definitely my personal favorite of all of our Halloween pumpkins!!

Although Joel's carved pumpkins didn't turn out too bad this year either. Joel has a strange thing for carving pumpkins. You can refresh your memory about previous years' pumpkins here and here. And for the record, the little tiny pumpkin with the strange carving is the symbol for Jupiter. That was a special request from Dean. He drew Joel a picture of the symbol to make sure Joel got it right. I googled it later to see if he was right and sure enough, he was. I'm learning not to question Dean.

And finally, it was Halloween. Dean had gymnastics on Halloween at 5:30 and we went to that first. Turned out Dean was the only gymnast who showed up that night!! It was OK though because he absolutely LOVED having Coach Stacie all to himself!! After gymnastics we headed home to pass out candy and see if we could coax Dean into his costume and out to do some trick-or-treating. We had to fight some SERIOUS traffic in our neighborhood. It was INSANE. I can't even describe how crowded our neighborhood is on Halloween. Every street in our neighborhood was lined with cars parked and kids were EVERYWHERE. When we got home, we were slammed with kids for an hour. We had purchased two huge bags of candy at Costco (the cheap bags with 500+ pieces of candy in each bag) and we completely ran out of candy in less than 45 minutes!! And we were handing out only 1 piece per kid!! That means in less than 45 minutes we had 1,000 trick or treaters at our house (or just about - initially we were giving out 2-3 pieces per kid, but after about 10 minutes of a steady stream of kids standing in a LINE in our driveway, we decided we better go to just 1 piece per kid). When we ran out of candy, we turned off the porch light and went inside and we could hear trick or treaters for AT LEAST another hour! Seriously. It is CRAZY in our neighborhood!! I think people drive in from all over Maui to bring their kids trick or treating. I have no idea why. It's not like we give out the good stuff or anything. Anyway, Joel and I took turns taking Dean to a few houses. He was NOT excited about the costume business. The ONLY thing he would agree to dress up as once again this year was a football player, which pretty much means he didn't really have to wear much of a costume at all - a jersey (which is basically a t-shirt) and a pair of shorts. We did make him carry a football. He refused to wear real shoes and would only wear his slippers and he wouldn't let us put any eye black under his eyes. Oh well. It was still better than the 14-yr-olds who came to our house with their pillow-case candy bags and no costume. So anyway, Joel and I took turns taking him to a few houses close to our house. We probably went to about 12 houses total and he did really well. After the first few houses of shyness and he figured out he was getting candy, he started walking right up to the door and saying "trick or treat", and he even said "thank you" at all but one house. We had a minor meltdown after that one house when he realized he forgot to say thank you. He started crying and hung his head and was really upset that he didn't say thank you. (so cute!).