I should have been posting last week instead of hiding from my computer. Because, now, I have loads of photos that I’m jamming into one big post. Well, actually I’m not going to jam them all in because there are too many. But I am stuffing a whole bunch in here.

This year, with the homeschool group, we went to a new pumpkin patch. At a farm! Smith family farm. There was a corn maze,

big pumpkins as big as Nathan,

old farm equipment, animals, a Miwok Indian village, a show the kids participated in, and a hay ride.



I thought it was pretty awesome. And everyone who paid entrance got to take a pumpkin home!

In that same week, we went to my friend Veronica’s pumpkin carving party. We’ve gone for three years now. It’s becoming a tradition. I didn’t want to go empty handed so I attempted to decorate cupcakes with a Halloween theme: skulls.

Sort of looks like a blob. With three holes.

Isabelle was running around playing. Like last year, she had no interest it pumpkin carving.

She did draw a face onto a pumpkin which I then gutted and carved.

Hers is the one next to my bat pumpkin.

Then on Halloween, we started our morning by lighting up our pumpkins during breakfast. I made Halloween themed pancakes like this bat.

And after breakfast, I finished sewing up Isabelle’s costume, McCall’s 6141. Originally she wanted to be a robot. That’s why my banner looks like that. She wanted me as a dinosaur and Nathan as a red ball. I arbitrarily chose Alan’s costume, Kick Ass. But then Isabelle changed her mind and wanted to be a princess. She chose the pattern and the pretty gold fabric. And I’ve rambled a bit. Back to what I was saying. Yes, you read that right. I finished sewing it up ON Halloween.

The night before, I thought I wasn’t going to finish it. The back ties call for eyelets.

When I tried putting the eyelets on, I screwed up about 80% of them. I don’t know what I was doing wrong but they were all bent out of shape and not staying. And, stupidly, I had only bought one pack so I couldn’t try again. I didn’t have a zipper so couldn’t go that route. None of my buttons would have looked right so that was a no.

I was stumped. I dreaded the thought of having to go back to the store to buy more eyelets. Doing that just to have a strong possibility of screwing the eyelets up again and again and needing to cut out more and more pieces of fabric.

I lay down for bed and then it dawned on me. Buttonholes! I got right up out of bed, though I was tired, and made 14 buttonholes. FOURTEEN! And that did the trick. Don’t need no stinkin’ eyelets. So, the next day all I needed to finish was the hem.

After I was done with Isabelle’s dress, I was feeling ambitious. I decided to make her a treat bag too, a little frog prince treat bag.

I went with a frog prince bag because I really wanted to sew Nathan a costume to match Isabelle. But since it took me freaking all week to make Isabelle’s costume, I did not have the time to make one for Nathan. We ended up using a frog prince towel for this picture.

He didn’t care for it.

That night he wore Isabelle’s old bee costume.

So the frog bag was a good route to go. Nathan didn’t go up to any doors so it was silly to even think of making him a matching prince costume.

And that was our Halloween festivities. How was your Halloween?

The other week I wanted to cut Nathan’s hair. It was getting long, starting to fall into his eyes. But it was late and he had already had his bath. Alan didn’t know how I was going to manage it, Nathan being so squirmy.

But I must have been in the haircutting mood. The next day, Isabelle’s hair was driving me a little crazy. It’s always coming out of clips and in her eyes so I asked her if she would like some bangs. She said, yes, so I cut her some bangs. When I was done she asked me why I stopped and didn’t cut the rest of her hair. So, I did cut the rest.

And then Alan did this with Nathan’s hair.

He definitely could do with a cut.

So, I tried. Just a little bit off the front.

Alan says he looks like Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber.

Video on Flickr

I don’t know why he doesn’t like sitting up straight in this chair.

Have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy our homeschool meetup group? And that’s even with me getting lost. Yep, lost. We did something different last week. We went to a ranch. And going somewhere new usually means the chances of me getting lost increase. And that’s even with GPS navigation.

When we were getting close to our destination, the voice on my phone said it was on the right. But it was just an empty lot. Turns out I missed a turn off on the right. So, naturally I kept going thinking it was just ahead somewhere. We ended up wandering around a state park for twenty minutes until I found a map that clearly showed the turn off.

When we finally arrived at the correct place, forty minutes late, I was beat. I sat down with my heavy, at least 25 pounds, weight Nathan, and just watched Isabelle have fun.

She looked at animals from a distance. She even braved petting a sheep though I wasn’t quick enough with the camera to capture that. And she wandered around playing with her friends and my camera.

I think this one is my favorite because of Isabelle’s shadow.

And this week we went to a park with a little stream. We’ve been to this particular park before so I knew to bring some food with me. Not food for us. Food for the crawdads!!

I brought some twine with me and the kids found branches and went crawdad fishing.

Well, not Nathan of course. I was busy holding Mr. Grump (Alan saw another tooth trying to work it’s way out and thinks that explains his mood lately) most of the time.

That would explain why I took three photos of the reflection of the sky when I was trying to take pictures of crawdads.

Lately whenever I sit down at the computer, it seems like Nathan complains. He likes having me sitting there on the floor near him. And I feel like I am barely getting on the computer. I try sitting with him on my lap but that doesn’t work either. Sigh.

So a real quick post about our weekend. On Saturday, Alan got home from work and we were sitting there when I decided to go through my purse. I found a family ticket from the Bay Area Discovery museum. It’s been in my wallet since February. We’ve never been there before so we decided to go. It was a nice drive out and when we arrived we were surprised to see how close it was to the Golden Gate Bridge.

We explored and played.



And now Nathan is whining and stomping his feet. The end.