What do you do when you have leftover paint from painting your front door lime green? You paint your pumpkin with it. Well, sort of...

I came across this very cool idea from Parents Magazine. I loved the colors, of course, since I have a lime green front door and an orange dining room. And, well, white goes with everything.

I recruited Apollo to help with the painting. He did quite well and enjoyed every minute of it:

Voila!

A bit of advice. I learned the hard way. Cut out your holes first, then paint. I had to do lots of touch ups afterwards, which would have been unnecessary had I painted last. You live and learn...

There you have it:

I bet you can guess who's this is:

Sascha's:

Poor Sarah's. I was sweeping off the table that was full of pine needles and leaned over just enough to bump her pumpkin right off the table. Before that happened it was a fabulous Leven Thumps pumpkin. Now it looks like some sort of bit-mapped scary jack-o-lantern. Still cool....

On display out front:

Hope everyone had a spooky Halloween! I'll post more pics from the festivites later.

I have to throw in a little explanation here even though this is "Wordless Wednesday." First of all, ya, I know, usually W.W. is a pic of Apollo. Who's to blame? He's easy on the eyes 8-)
Secondly, you have to click on this picture to see the utter shock in his face. He couldn't believe that Duncan and Kaitlyn's car was right next to ours after we came out of the store. It really wasn't their car, but the same make, model and color.

Click on the picture to print.

For "us" Washingtonians, there's a T.G.I Friday's in Kirkland, Tacoma and Puyallup.

For those of you not familiar, click on the picture below to watch the video. And make sure to turn up your volume. We will not disappoint...

Never have I had to call poison control, nor have I wanted to.
Last Saturday was my first. Here's the story:
While I was minding my own business (I don't remember exactly what I was doing at the moment), I heard Sarah in the living room exclaiming to Apollo, "NO!" It didn't sound like the usual so I ran in there to find Apollo sitting on the couch, grinning from ear to ear with a small bowl full of "candy." It wasn't candy. They were vitamins. You know the kind that look like candy and taste like candy? Yep. I hurried and grabbed them away with my heart racing wondering how many he ate. I quickly poured them back into their rightful container and noticed how low the supply was compared to what I remembered it being earlier that day when I gave him a vitamin. I kept racking my brain trying to remember how full it used to be. I knew he had to have at least eaten 15-20 vitamins. I ran around quickly seeing if maybe, just maybe he had spilled a bunch of them somewhere. No luck.
The next step was to check online to see what to do. As I was reading about vitamin overdose, I kept hearing the same thing, "call poison control." So that's just what I did. I read to them the exact name of the vitamins so they knew what they were dealing with. After doing some research they let me know that since they were children's vitamins there was no risk of death by Vitamin A or Iron. Whew!!! I was worried about the Iron. They did say that some vitamins contain selenium which can cause a heat rash which can be uncomfortable, and then that another element can cause diarrhea. Other than that, he would be fine. YAY! I could deal with those things. Luckily he didn't get the heat rash, but oh boy did he get the diarrhea. Through the whole experience he was his regular happy-go-lucky self on massive amounts of vitamins = super hyper!!! I'm so relieved that he's okay. Big lesson for that day: NOTHING IS CHILD-PROOF!!! Don't believe what the bottle says. HIDE MEDICINES/VITAMINS, ETC....
Later that day this was his comment, "I don't wanna vitamin Mommy."
Usually he's jumping up and down for one.

I'm always finding great ideas on other blogs, but this one I HAD to snatch. It looks so organized and clean and what a great way for little ones to find books rather than sifting through the book shelf. I figure that I'll just swap out the books with new ones every week or so. It also makes cleaning up books a snap for Apollo. We'll see if he follows through. These were super easy to make and install. I ended up paying around $26 for both shelves which are 5' each. Also, before I installed these Apollo discovered how fun it was to race his cars down the gutters. I might have to go back and get another one for his cars. lol...
You'll find the rain gutter bookshelves tutorial here at Raising Olives.

This is the picture from the Raising Olives blog that inspired me:

Here's another one that inspired me that I found on Google images: