Peter Peter Pumpkin Seed Eater

In a gift from the school schedule Gods, the kids had a vacation day yesterday, so I decided to do the same and spend the day at home with them nursing our sugar hangovers. Since I work full-time outside of the house, I rarely get to host playdates here, so I took advantage of my availability and invited two little friends over to play as well. I started the day with a big bowl of steel cut oatmeal and a cup of hot coffee and then set-up some crafts for the kids to dig into as soon as their buddies arrived. What started off an organized pile looking like this:

...turned into this in mere minutes:

Believe it or not, this pile of crafts only held their attention for about 30 minutes, so then we moved on to activity #2 - pumpkin seed roasting. We never actually got around to carving our pumpkins this year, so I cut off the tops and had the kids scoop out all the innards:

We separated the pumpkin "goo" from the seeds, and laid the seeds out on a towel in the sun to dry a bit:

Then I tossed them in a bowl with some olive oil and salt and roasted them in the oven for 30 minutes at 300 degrees.  Delicious!

After the playdate wound down we spent the rest of the afternoon on the sofa recovering from the flurry of activity and munching on our seeds. It was a great long weekend full of friends and candy and laughter and games.