A plethora of pumpkins

We have been waxing unusually artistic at our house this week. My mom tells me that when I was little (starting around age 2), I would go through reams of paper, drawing elegant princesses whose trains were so long they trailed off the page. So I waited, hopefully, for my own children to show some of my own love of drawing. Andrew, unfortunately, has (till now) shown almost no interest in drawing--scribbling rapidly for all of twenty seconds at a time before losing interest. When he did deign to sit longer, it was usually only to demand that *I* draw something for him.

So it was with a pleasant sense of surprise that I witnessed Andrew's emerging interest in art this week. Some of it has to be due to his cousins' influence: Jeni's family spent the night at our house last Sunday night enroute to "The Happiest Place on Earth" (aka Disneyland), and her kids whiled away the time before their early departure Monday morning drawing pictures in Andrew's room. Andrew, naturally, wanted to draw with them. Surprisingly, his fervor for drawing persisted after they left, and he and Evelyn have spent part of every day this week drawing. This has both good and bad consequences: among the good ones, Andrew's showing a renewed interest in learning to write letters, and he can finally draw a stick figure that actually resembles a person, even if he does like to draw the arms coming out of the ears. Among the bad ones: Evelyn has developed an unalterable fixation with crayons. She seems happiest when she has one crayon stuck in each hand, and will scream loudly if you try to pry them out of her determined little fingers. (Which, unfortunately, we seem to do often, as she is prone to wandering around the house with the crayons and has apparently no discrimination as to what kind of surface she should draw on. I've already had to scrub her scribbles off the wall in Andrew's room--to be fair, it must be hard for her to understand why she can't draw on the wall when I have so clearly painted on the walls).

We also finally finished a week-long art project this week. Inspired by the Snow White's castle in this month's Family Fun magazine, we decided to make our own. Of course, Andrew insisted on painting some of the towers colors other than white, so we ended up with a more colorful version than the original. And we didn't have all the right sized boxes, so we improvised. But Andrew was thrilled with the results, and that's all that matters, right? Besides putting all those cardboard rolls to use, of course.

Aside from that, this weeks' theme seemed to be pumpkins. Since Andrew was cruelly deprived of his only preschool field trip by dint of his mother's untimely conference, we figured the least we could do was replicate the field trip for him. Since his class was to have gone to a pumpkin patch in Paragonah, we went to the pumpkin patch in Paragonah for family home evening. Andrew was excited by all the pumpkins and ranged over the whole field in search of the perfect one. (In an attempt to curb overly ambitious pumpkin selection, we told him he had to be able to lift his pumpkin). Because of the recent frosts, some of the pumpkins had started to rot, but we finally found one that was relatively sound.

Not my most flattering picture, but Evelyn looks cute, and you can see Andrew running off ahead (the story of the evening).

The next day, we finally picked the pumpkins growing in our own back yard. (Why, you ask, did we bother going to a pumpkin patch when we had our own? Good question. Mostly so Andrew wouldn't feel too left out of his fieldtrip--it had little or nothing to do with the pumpkins).

We put the pumpkins on the front doorstep--so far, our only concession to approaching holidays. Andrew's been decorating the pumpkins with dead leaves, so our front doorstep now looks suitable untidy (despite my attempts to sweep it, since Andrew zealously protected his "decorations").

We celebrated the advent of a three-day weekend by heading to St. George. After running errands in the early part of the afternoon, we finished off at the new pool in Washington, which was really pretty incredible. Evelyn gave a little scream of delight when she emerged from the dressing room and saw it for the first time. They had a large indoor pool with a splash pad for kids and some little slides; they also had a lazy river that circled from indoors through a sunny patio outside and back indoors; and they had a fantastic little tree with four suspended jumpers, perfect for little ones like Evelyn. Andrew would have loved to stay longer, but Evelyn's teeth finally started chattering and we decided it was time to go. Tomorrow, we're hoping to do a little hiking (and a little housework--but that doesn't look like nearly as much fun).