Apple Faces and Alphabets

After a highly (ahem) nutritious breakfast featuring leftover cheesecake and Persian tea we cleared the table and began working on Halloween decorations. The kids and I have decided to have a special Halloween dinner this year (poor Mehran) and are beginning to get things organized now. Well, at least the apple faces as those take at least two weeks to properly dry out.

We began by peeling some apples and coating them with a mixture of lemon juice and salt.

Then we carved out facial features with blunt butter knives, adding whole cloves for the eyes and using grains of white rice to make teeth. The kids had a blast. Ruhi and Anisa each made two. Ruhi created a vampire phantom with horns and a jack-o-lantern and Anisa made a couple of creepy faces. Mostly she just liked poking grains of rice into the mouths she had carved, some were a bit haphazard and crazy so in the end they will probably wind up as a dentist's worst nightmare with numerous clusters of jagged teeth haphazardly jutting out of shrivelled mouths. But freedom of expression and boundless creativity was the point, after all.

Meanwhile Bayan used his apples as a mid-morning snack. I believe it was Anisa who attempted to salvage one of them. Notice the teeth marks around the eye sockets. I am curious to see how that one turns out.

After the apples were placed in a safe spot to dry out I made some alphabet cards, gathered some clothes pegs and hung up some string on the veranda posts. Anisa was given a challenge to see if she could correctly identify all the letters of the alphabet and could hang them in order on the clothesline. She loved this, was super proud of herself and only occasionally did she enlist Ruhi's help.

I have been teaching her the sounds of the letters (in non alphabetical order) and wanted to see if she could arrange them based on their names instead of their sounds. She did great. She also wanted me to include a picture of the pancake breakfast I made for them a few days ago. Bayan's never lasted for the photo op. Anisa's name was jumbled as it didn't quite fit on the plate, but she had fun rearranging the letters in the right order anyway. Ruhi's just fit. They were very yummy. Although next time I must remember to squeeze the batter so that the letters are backwards. That way they will look more attractive when you flip them.