October catch-up

It seems like all my posts are some kind of "update" or "catch-up" but that's what happens when you have four kids I guess.  We are having a speedy fall season.  Our backyard football games are over already and it's playoff time (and our school didn't make it), the pumpkins are harvested and we just got about 8 inches of snow!  Hahahahaheheehahaaha (insane laughter no it's not a joke).

Here is a heaping trailer filled with pumpkins.  We have given away many many loads of these and decorated our own house and still we have piles.  I wanted to sell them for a fundraiser but then the previously mentioned snow happened and no one is really in the mood to sell produce on a trailer in a big puddle of slush and mud.  We did some other decorating around the house with gourds and pumpkins including these five top of the line pumpkins from the patch:

and this scraggly corn arrangement I put together.  Eeek.

We also got the second generation of the Christmas projector I'm sure I mentioned last year and the new one has slides for all different holidays.  

Notice the still green grass in this photo because that very night while we slept this happened! 

Yeah. Really.  It was actually the second snow. We had another smaller one last week.  It is very annoying.  It's beautiful and magical and the kids love it but it's also slushy, muddy and wet and shoveling it is, in the words of my dad a few years ago when he was describing another snow to a friend, "it feels exactly like lifting a shovel of grain.  Brings back nightmares...hahaha..." The temperature is barely freezing so the gutters on the streets are clogged with slush and leaves. Also, there are fields full of beans and corns waiting for a combine which would instantly be buried in the mud if the snow wasn't there.  Oh well...what can you do.  Warmer weather ahead next week apparently.

Also passing us by is Milo's 3rd birthday on the 7th.  I will never forget that strange evening of October 6 when I started realizing I was in labor.  Yes, he was my third child but I'd never gone into labor on my own before.  I had a vegetable platter ready to bring to a MOPS meeting the next morning, we were preparing my house for my mom to come and stay with the kids when I got induced on the 8th and an hour before I had been outside giving my neighbors pumpkins.  I almost didn't want to believe it was really happening.  I am still relieved my neighbors were able to take the kids and his birth went so well.  If it hadn't been that way I probably wouldn't have had a fourth kid (sorry Calvin! But you were still meant to be!)

Now he's a threenager complete with screaming "Nnnnnoooo!", stealing pacifiers every chance he gets and pestering his siblings constantly.

We made his birthday pumpkin themed (of course!) with a pumpkin cake and some carved letter pumpkins.

I'm so proud of these.  It was also nice to get an early batch of pumpkin seeds to roast and eat.