Double shot: Trip to the farm stand / Halloween

Well.  Since I've clearly been neglecting my assigned duty to keep you all up-to-date with our doings, probably should get going on that.  Here is a little fall gallery for your viewing pleasure.  The first section is from a little trip we took to a local farm stand in Dexter back in the beginning of October.  Oopsie, I've had this one in the works for a while.  Also oopsie, I forgot the camera at home and so was forced to document our visit using the camera phone (tough world we live in, isn't it?); the pictures actually turned out pretty good except for the ones where I zoomed in.

Feeding the horses.

Julia and Mama hangin' out.

Mary, getting ready to go into the straw maze, and Luke, doin his thing.

This thing was pretty cool...about fifteen feet high, with tunnels and rooms inside the giant pile of straw.  I didn't go in, except at the end to extract the kidlets; just looking at it made me claustrophobic.

 And finally, two things that are ubiquitous in Michigan in the fall:

1. Pumpkins, and

2. Pumpkin donuts, because apparently donuts themselves are not amazing enough.

There's usually cider, too, but it was really expensive this year since we lost all the apple crop because of the spring frost.  Donuts and cider in the fall are everywhere in Michigan.  I was talking to Sarah about this the other day...I don't remember having that be such a big thing in Minnesota this time of year.  I mean, we went apple-picking, and I'm sure that they had those for sale on a small scale at the orchards, but here, it's like a requirement of life.  Every year, September comes, and they get out the donuts.  And they eat them for two solid months.  I'm not objecting to this, mind you.

Next up: obligatory Halloween photos.  As is our tradition, Grandma came to visit this year for the week after a one-year hiatus.  It was pretty darn cold so we conned Mary into wearing the marshmallow suit instead of her ballerina costume.  As it was she still got too cold after about half an hour.
I think the other two could have kept it up all night.

Moosie had a cold coming on and so was pretty gorked through much of the process.