Pumpkin Carving/Game Night

We had a pumpkin carving and game night here at the house. We invited others from church to join us. I am a last minute party planner, so not many people were able to come but it worked out nicely for our not so large house.
Pumpkin carving ended up taking way longer than we had planned. It was suppose to be a contest, but really there were no prizes, saying it was a contest just made everyone more excited about it. I started out carving one of our pumpkins and we let Josh carve out the other large one we had. I wanted to carve an owl in a tree on ours. It started out nicely, but quickly went down hill. I called in the real creative one, Kyle. He was able to turn my ugly and deformed owl into a barn owl and salvage the rest of the pumpkin. It looked awesome then Gunnar grabbed hold of a branch and broke some of it off. I still thought it was cute, even if a toothpick had to assist in keeping some of it together.
I put the pumpkins out on the porch and now the squirrels have been eating them. The owl is completely gone and the rest of the pumpkins all have nice teeth marks in them. Oh well.
For games we just ended up playing Apples to Apples. We seemed to have a nice sized group for the game and we all did a lot of laughing and had a good time.
For Halloween this year we decided not to really participate. Kyle is really having strong convictions about this not being a holiday that our family participates in. This year while it was hard for me not to dress the kids up, I supported his decision. We did however had candy out of kids at our door and carve our pumpkins. Kyle and I are going to be doing a lot of reading on the origins of Halloween and how/why it's celebrated and decide from their is Halloween is something we will participate with in the future.
Carving away....

 The carvers with their pumpkins.

Ryker and Gunnar adore Wesley. They get so excited when they hear he is coming over to play.

Playing Apples to Apples

 I got to enjoy holding this sweet little one while we played the game.

 The day after our party I came out to the dining room to see Gunnar had put all these plates on the table. He said "mom, we have birthday party, ok?" Haha...apparently he was ready for another party.

Gunnar loves the pumpkins. He gets excited every time he sees them. Ryker could care less, as you may have noticed.