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.

Chaos ensues

This week my crazy wife decided to take advantage of some of the post-Halloween sales. Clearance crap, I have found, is kind of like a fight brewing in a bar: I'm drawn to it, because I want to see what's going on, yet in truth I want nothing to do with it (and I definitely don't want it in my house). While we did score some sweet Halloween decorations and costumes for next year on the cheap, Sarah grabbed a couple things that I generally try to avoid at all costs.

The first was some new dress-up clothes for the girls. Now, as a rule I hate dress-up clothes. When they're pulled out if the box I invariably spend the morning playing "Can you put this on me?" and mending the bumped heads brought on by the tiny, plastic, lethal high-heeled shoes the girls like to wear. (Clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp-THUD. "Waaaahhhhhh!") But whatever. If a new dress or two will occupy them for a morning, fine. I'm all for it.

The other thing to hit our cart was a haunted-house style gingerbread house kit, complete with assorted small candies and frosting packets to decorate it. Those things make me shudder, for two reasons. Number one: by the time you actually purchase the thing, get it home, unwrap it, build it, and eat it, the cookies are so ancient that they resemble concrete slabs (which I suppose is appropriate, since they're being used for building materials and all). The second reason is the potential for mess-making. Or more correctly stated,

MESS-MAKING!!!

Two preschoolers + gooey frosting + thousands of tiny sprinkles = one enormous mess that I have to clean up.

I made Sarah supervise the building activity as my revenge.

Multiple plates of tiny mess-making particles, or as some people call them, decorations.


And here we go!



First taste of frosting. It's all downhill from here, folks. Avert your eyes.


Luke, oblivious to the impending carnage, plays with the toy of the day (TotD): cookie cutters!


I can't watch!





Mary surveys her creation...


...and revels in the deliciousness of black frosting.


The amazing duck-billed cat Sarah made of fondant.


Epilogue: Luke watching Papa weep as the mess is made.

It's Halloween again

As has become our tradition, Grandma Beth came to visit over the Halloween weekend. This generally means lots of homemade bread and soup, getting things done in the yard, and trick-or-treating. There are LOTS of leaves down on our street (I think everyone is waiting until they're all done to rake) so the girls had some fun with those too. It was an interesting Halloween, getting to know a whole new neighborhood and wondering what the weather was going to do. Turns out trick-or-treating felt a lot like good old St Cloud - cool enough to need jackets but not so much that we wished we'd stayed home.
I'm short on clever things to say this time around, so we'll let the photos speak for themselves. I went a little overboard this time...

It's carving time.

Mary does not like to get dirty.

Unless it involves eating, of course.

Along with the neighbor kids, we had quite the hodgepodge of costumes.

Moosie was a vampire, complete with bloody drool.

This one cracks me up.

And they're off!

And of course there was time for the inevitable sink-bath from Grandma.

Halloween 2009

Happy Halloween!
This year, our Halloween Package Deal included one stinky, kneiving, exuberant skunk, a puffy, zealous, nerd-eating marshmallow, and a patient, industrious, SUPER grandma. We sure had a fun time.

Friday night, we went to "Malloween." Yup...the mall shops put on a trick-or-treating event for the kids in town. I had NO IDEA how popular it was. Mike was working, so Mom and I piled the kiddos in the van and took off. As we were driving away, my neighbor, who has twins, laughed and told us we were nuts to go to the mall. Why? I thought. It's warm in there, and we can practice trick-or-treating.

WHOA. It was UBER-CROWDED. Like cheese curd line, state-fair crowded! There were literally thousands of people there, ushering little goblins, witches, faries, and mysteriously-clad kiddos from one store to another to get free dum dums. (I noticed a blatant absence of chocolate. It was one of those deals where "trick or treat" gets you either a tiny tootsie roll, a piece of gum, or if you're lucky, a sucker...)

The kids were great. Mary stayed in the stroller after her first piece of candy...a dum dum...her favorite...and Julia walked because, frankly, she didn't fit in the stroller in her marshmallow suit.

My skunk and marshmallow, ready for action!

Little miss skunk waits in line for her first piece of glory. The big white blob next door is Miss Marshmallow.

The girls lasted about 30 minutes of Mall O Ween. Then, miss Marshmallow was overheating and we moved on to supper at a mall restaurant.

An evil grin: I stole mommy's wallet!!!! Ha!

ANOTHER evil grin: I am the comander of this ship! Ha!

Julia is in heaven....Grandma Beth actually put money into the ride. Mommy NEVER does that. The girls didn't even know that the mall spaceship moved. Now they do. Crap. I will never carry quarters again.

Home, after a bath, reading stories with g-ma. mary is evilly grinning again. This time, I don't know what she's up to.

Halloween! Papa was master-carver. I harvested pumpkin seeds. Julia helped. Mary "helped."

Julia was grumpy because the pumpkin was making her itchy. She started chucking pumpkin guts around the kitchen and got a stern look from mommy. That's when grandma took the picture. This is the stern look that I got in return for the one I gave.

Evil vampire teeth!

Thar she blows! Julia in her SMarshmallow suit. This year, we asked her what she wanted to be for halloween. We offered typical things: a princess, tinkerbell, a fairy, a witch, etc. Nope. Without question, she wanted to be a "smarshmallow." All righty, then. Papa went to the fabric store and bought out their white fleece and six bags of polyester fiber fill. Let's just say she didn't get cold that night.

A picture with grandma!

My skunk. Notice the dum dum in her hand. She spent the entire evening eating suckers. Mary was actually able to carry her candy bag AND eat a sucker at the same time! What skill!

Family picture. That's the rest of us there behind that marshmallow-child.

Ready for action!

Aidan and Sawyer, our neighbor's twin boys. They were our first trick-or-treaters.

Trick or treat!!!