1. Find some hidden part of the house (or part of your belongings if you rent) and help your kids scribble messages about who they are now. Years from now you’ll be able to take out that dresser drawer and see your little boy’s words underneath or crawl in the closet and see who your daughter was in second grade.
2. Have a giving contest. Tell the whole family that you’re having a challenge to see who can do the nicest thing for someone else (outside of the family). If you like, you can have a new contest every day of the week, with the winner each day getting a small reward like wearing a silly crown during supper. Whoever wins the most during the week gets to pick a neat thing to do on the weekend. Make sure the real reward is seeing how happy you make people.
3. Totally doll up the dining room table for supper tonight. Gather leaves to scatter on the tablecloth, make an arrangement of cut twigs, flowers or grasses. Use pine cones, candles, acorns or treasures from around the house to make it a work of art.
4. After dark, sneak outside with the kids and howl at the moon. Never mind the neighbors. They’re no fun anyway. 😉
5. Go cruising with the radio turned up too loud. Take turns choosing the music. Sing along and hand jive.
6. Play hide-and-go-seek in the house.
7. Leave a thank you card under his pillow, telling him how much he means to you and how much you appreciate what a fantastic kid he is.
8. Brag about your child on the phone when you know she can hear. Tell how proud you are of her and how great she is. It’ll mean more to her than you’d guess.
9. Burn up a whole roll of film being as silly, goofy and funny looking as you can be. Frame some of the pictures and leave them out as a reminder to be silly more often.
10. Poke, pound, pester and pulverize your leftover pumpkins! Have you tried this yet? I’ve been telling you to do it for years and it’s such outrageous fun. Make designs, spell out words, nail pretty leaves in patterns, try pounding different objects in, pull the pegs out and leave cool hole patterns and just pound them…
(Note traces of vampire makeup remaining!)
Alex was napping but when he hammers his pumpkin he will use a rubber mallet!)
RIP jack-o-lanterns.
Thanks for a fun month.
Pumpkin smashing! Love it!
In New Zealand we don’t do Halloween…but I thought we would do a pumpkin this year. We don’t sell those beautiful looking pumpkins, so we had a mini pumpkin and made do. The kids loved having the candle inside. I NEVER thought about smashing it with a hammer! My kids would LOVE that. I think I will fish it out of the garbage and have a “magical activity” tomorrow!
PS I grinned when you said hide and seek. We just finshed playing hide and seek in the dark, where we get the house as dark as possible (as dark as the little kids can handle) and the person who is “it” uses a lantern/torch to find everyone. Lots of fun!
Glad to find another mum who likes to be crazy with their kids!
Re: Pumpkin smashing! Love it!
The hide and seek in the dark sounds so fun! We’ll have to try that too.
We have an abundance of pumpkins. We buy produce from a nearby farm family and they sell them for $2 for the really big ones and next to nothing for the pie pumpkins. I love pumpkin treats and I like supporting local farmers so we bought a LOT of pumpkins this year! You can never have too many pumpkins though, right? 🙂
Have fun with your little pumpkin smashing!