Halloween Fun

Saturday morning and Ashley & Brian are ready to begin the nasty work of scooping out the pumpkin guts ... particularly disgusting this year because our nearly orange pumpkin was rotting out the back side. Apparently this is a common problem with pumpkins here in Mongolia. They don't like the cold October, so they are harvested early while they are still mostly green. Then they don't ripen properly, just rot instead. Our pumpkin still worked fine as a Jack-o-Lantern. Ashley was the master carver this time and made a spooky face for Jack.

"Mom, why do I have to wear these gloves?"

"To avoid getting all this pumpkin barf on your fingers!"

The thick walls of this pumpkin made it a challenge to carve, but Ashley stuck with it and made this scary face. It looked nice all lit up on Halloween.

All the Americans living at our compound put together a fun evening BBQ and party on Halloween. We helped decorate our community center with lots of spooky things, made an amazing haunted house, had carnival type games and yummy BBQ foods to eat. The music CD had cute songs like "Ghostbusters", "The Adams Family" and "Monster Mash" as well as some other more spooky songs. There was dancing to strobe lights and black lights and of course trick-or-treating with tons and tons of candy. Ian and I ran the fishing game that evening. He hid behind the blue mat and gave out treats to all the kiddos who came to fish. A friend of mine ran the balloon game where each child had a balloon tethered to their leg and had to try to pop another's balloon while protecting their own. Ian had a blast with this game!! There was also a mummy wrap game where kids teamed up to wrap each other with toilet paper. Ashley had fun checking out the haunted house and hanging around with her classmates who also attended the party. I dressed as Mr. Spock, Charles as Captain Kirk, Ian was (from Star Trek the Next Generation) Commander Riker, Ashley dressed-up as Hermione from Harry Potter and Brian chose Thomas the Tank Engine. Brian's favorite thing (besides the candy) was dancing to the strobe lights and enjoying the oh-so-loud party music. Charles was kind enough to volunteer to man the BBQ, even though it was about 10 F outside with snow on the ground. He cooked up 200 hotdogs & bratwursts for the event. A good time was had by all. Happy Halloween!


The community center all decked out. Here's our fishing game set-up: