If that blog post title doesn’t draw you in, not sure what will… 😉
Our main adventure this weekend was watermelon carving on Saturday afternoon!
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I’m continuing my ongoing partnership with The Watermelon Board, and they challenged us to carve watermelons this year for Halloween instead of pumpkins!
We’ve done this before (in 2017, one month before Riese arrived!) and actually love it because then we have tons of delicious watermelon to eat after.
We invited our friend Shane to join us, like last time, and we all set up outside on the back patio.
To carve a watermelon, you treat it the same as a pumpkin, and slice off the top (or the bottom – we ended up doing that this time since they wouldn’t stand up otherwise) and scoop out the insides before carving! I used an ice cream scoop and that worked really well to get out all the yummy watermelon flesh.
Matt’s was my favorite – isn’t his unicorn with the tongue sticking out fun?
Here’s Shane’s – he ended up scraping the green rind off the teeth so they looked white after I took this pic:
And here’s mine! I usually wing it (vs. following a pattern) and this is what I ended up with. Adding the sticks to make arms was Matt’s idea – loved it!
Meanwhile, Riese enjoyed painting some mini pumpkins. 🙂 She’s a bit young for super sharp knives…!
All together now! With a bowl hat for Shane’s. 🙂
If you’re intrigued by the watermelon carving idea, check out the Watermelon Board’s “Carving” section of their website – they have some crazy cool ideas on there and lots of tips, too!
After our carving party, Matt grilled us up some dinner. We had sausages + sauerkraut + mustard + a side of baked beans and veggies (which were still on the grill when I started eating so I grabbed some later):
Other food highlights from the weekend included my Veggie Egg Casserole (<- recipe), which is always a fave:
We had it at my parent’s house for brunch along with some bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon, and some huge hunks of leftover watermelon we brought over from our carving extravaganza!
We also had some yummy enchiladas this weekend – stay tuned, more enchilada awesomeness is coming at you in the form of a recipe on Wednesday.
I also started reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle this weekend – I bought it in hard copy because a few friends and I are going to start a virtual book club and this is the first book we chose to discuss, so I wanted to be able to dog ear pages, highlight things, etc.
So far I’m finding it really, really interesting – have any of you read it?
I will leave you with a hot tip for my local friends: Dolce and Bean in Del Ray has amazing gelato and really friendly staff. We went there on Friday before dinner because it was randomly 80 degrees and sunny so why not? Riese loved it, of course. 🙂
We grabbed dinner after (also outdoors) at nearby Kaizen – steak tacos + sushi hit the spot!
One last thing before I go, for my fellow bloggers: have you heard of iMark Interactive? I discovered them earlier this year after finding myself continually frustrated by issues with my website that I had no idea how to fix, or who to go to.
I signed on with iMark’s monthly WordPress support plan (the “Ready” option) and have honestly been incredibly impressed by the support. They’ve been able to fix issues in minutes that I thought would take weeks, and I love knowing that they are keeping an eye on things behind the scenes for me every single day! Use the code “THANKS10” to get 10% off their WordPress support plans “Ready” and higher. They also have a great “beginner blogger tune up” package, for those just getting started.
Anyway – I wanted to give them a shout out specifically because they just launched a Site Speed Course for bloggers today, and it’s currently on sale for the next 48 hours. Check it out via my affiliate link here. It will teach you everything you need to know about how to speed up your website!
Alternatively, you can do what I did and hire them to do the site speed improvement service for you – it’s more expensive, but for me it was worth it to not have to worry about it.
Either way – wanted to give them some love because I’ve been such a big fan!
Have a nice day and see you back here on Wednesday!
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Please note there are affiliate links in this post.
