Month: October 2013

We picked out the candy that we were going to use for Halloween, a couple of weeks ago when we discovered a new candy store. I had sent Kyle in to go check it out, while I waited in the car with the kids. He got super excited to find that they sold See’s sugar sticks. See’s doesn’t even sell their sugar sticks any more! Then we got even more excited to find that we could buy 200 of them for $5, which makes each stick about 2 cents. Right then we decided that was what we were passing out for Halloween, and picked up a couple of cases.

232 sugar sticks all ready and waiting for the trick or treaters to show up. 🙂

I spent the morning getting the porch all cleaned up so that it would look nice when we put the decorated pumpkins out. The kids spent the day freaking out that we hadn’t decorated the pumpkins yet. When I was a kid we always got the pumpkins ready on Halloween. For us that hasn’t always worked, especially when Kyle was working two jobs, and sometimes we have decorated them the night before (sometimes they got decorated after Halloween….) Today Debby came over after nap and we started decorating the pumpkins before Kyle got home, but finished the last few after he got home.

           

Kyle arrived home with our traditional pizza for dinner, and we tried to eat up and finish up the last few pumpkins at the same time. Then the first few trick or treaters made their appearance and we decided we had better get out there. I love that we can go while the sun is still up, and that means getting to bed at a somewhat decent hour when they are all done going around.

I usually stay home and try to clean house in between passing out candy every couple of minutes, but Debby offered to stay at the house and pass out candy so I could go out with Kyle and the kids.

By the time we had gone up one street and down the other side, we came back up part of our street, it was quite dark. So I stayed home to spend some time with Debby and to get Adam and Lydia ready for bed. But you can’t go to bed after trick or treating without having some candy first. Adam was happy just with a bottle of milk, Lydia on the other hand wanted to double dose on the lolly pops.

Kyle took the kids out for a little bit more and I think they just finished up the rest of our street, so we never even made it to the third street that makes up our ward. By the time they came back there weren’t very many more trick or treaters going around. At the end of the evening we had only 9 sugar sticks left in the basket. I was told that there were only a few kids that ended up taking 2 sugar sticks so that means we had around 200+ trick or treaters this year.

We went to go pick out some pumpkins today! We were kind of waiting for the prices to go down, but they just didn’t this year. So we just said forget it and went to the grocery store. They were pretty picked over when we got there. The giant mound of pumpkins that had been in front of the store was now just some pumpkins on the ground with lots of foot space in between. It was also SUPER windy, so we wanted to get this over with quick. Each kid got to pick their own. Kyle talked Lydia into picking a small golden squash instead of a pumpkin, so I picked out a pumpkin for her to decorate for Halloween. I also picked out Adam’s.

The bigger kids weren’t so easy to please and took more time to pick out their pumpkins. The cold wind didn’t help as they spent most of the time trying to bundle up as they peaked at the pumpkins that were available.

They all eventually found a pumpkin they were willing to call theirs and we went inside to go buy them. One of the store employees saw our load of pumpkins and said “Wow! That’s a lot of pumpkins.” My response was “Well, one per kid!” 🙂

Uncle Denis called and said that he has plenty of apples this year! He called several weeks later this year than he usually does and I was starting to think that maybe there just wasn’t any fruit this year either (that is what happened last year). So we decided to make a trip to Mt Pleasant today to go pick some apples.

Uncle Denis wasn’t there when we got there, but that is ok, because he is almost never at home when we go to pick apples, and he knew we were coming so he left the ladders out for us. Uncle Aaron and Aunt Linda happened to come out to pick some apples too, so we had a little extra adult supervision. 🙂 Because it was later, than usual when we got there to pick apples, so many apples had fallen from the trees. We were smooshing apples with our feet with every step we took. Uncle Denis usually just leaves the fallen apples on the floor of the orchard for the deer to eat through the winter. He says that they dig through the snow with their noses to find the apples so they can eat them.

The bigger kids helped pick some of the apples this year, which was nice. I think something like picking apples can be a lot of work, but it can be fun too. Aunt Linda had brought a couple of quilts to lay on the ground around a tree, then she would shake it to get the apples to fall off onto the quilt. The kids thought this was an awesome way to “pick” apples, so when they didn’t get to be the one on the ladder to pick apples they went to go help shake trees. 🙂 We took a break in the middle of the day to go have a lunch snack and some ice cream at a local restaurant with Uncle Aaron and Aunt Linda. When we finished there we headed back to Uncle Denis’ house and there we said goodbye to Uncle Aaron and Aunt Linda because they had enough apples and were ready to leave.

Lydia and Adam didn’t do much picking, but they did a lot of munching on apples. 😉

Uncle Denis and Aunt Marti came home in the evening. They brought a couple of pizzas with them in case we were still there picking apples. So when it got too dark to pick any more, we went inside and had dinner. When everyone had eaten their fill, we asked Uncle Denis if he would talk to Ethan and Tyra about photography stuff. Ethan was working on the photography pin for cub scouts and Tyra was working on the digital photographer badge for girl scouts. So Uncle Denis took us down the hall of marbles (the hall walls are both lined with loads of marbles) to his studio. The kids got a bit side tracked by the marbles. The boys especially liked checking them out, but they went to the studio anyway to learn about photography.

It’s was funny to read some of the requirements of the pin and have Uncle Denis say that cameras don’t even do that any more. So much of it seems obsolete now, like digital photography is so different than photography when film was involved. When we were done talking about photography, we made the kids make a final trip to the bathroom so that their bladders would be ready for the long trip home and we started loading the kids up. Uncle Denis showed the boys his collection of Batman stuff while they waited for their turns in the bathroom. And we came home with loads of apples! 😀