Fall is in the Air

I love fall in Idaho. The weather is awesome and the scenery is gorgeous. 

Late Monday afternoon was no exception. The girls and I found ourselves home by 5:00 and nothing was on the agenda for the evening, so we headed over to a local pumpkin patch to select our pumpkins for the year.

We hadn't been to the pumpkin patch since I went back to work, so this was a big treat for us.

The only thing I could have asked for was two girls to not be acting like total dorks.

They make it very difficult for me to get frame worthy pictures.

The light was perfect for fall pictures. Too bad it wouldn't last long.

The pumpkins were four for $20, so we picked the biggest ones we could find.

And there were a lot to choose from.

I took this picture of Stinkerbell four years ago at the pumpkin patch.

And this one of Zoe Bug.

I was crossing-my-fingers-hoping to get some similar shots this year, but they just weren't feelin' it.

 Stinkerbell liked this pumpkin with the warts on it, so I told her she should kiss it. She wasn't interested.

I love that the pumpkin patch has wagons for us to borrow, because there was no way we were going to be able to carry our behemoth pumpkins to the car.

Just pulling the wagon was a chore in itself.

I'm afraid to see the quantity of pumpkin guts inside these babies. We're saving that chore for next weekend.

This here is our little Bunnery Sergeant. The girls have buried him in leaves.

I'd like to say that he was a good sport about it, but if you look closely you can see that they've tied him to the tree to keep him from running.

I'd scold them, but it's totally something I would do myself.

Poor little Bunny Man.

Don't worry, he didn't stay there long. As soon as I snapped these pictures he stood up and gave us all a leaf bath.

It was pretty impressive the way he scattered the leaves hither and tither.

Lunch Box ID Tags Take Two

This is another one of those projects that has been on my To Do list forever. Since it's been two weeks since I last posted, I figured I'd better light a fire under my butt and get something done. So I picked this because it was relatively easy and didn't require too many decisions.

Sometimes decisions paralyze me.

I can't tell you how many projects I have going that just have the undesirable task of making an unimportant decision in order to wrap it up. Like, "I can't hang those pictures because I want to get a new couch someday and I don't know how big it will be, or where I will position it, or if it will match," blah, blah, blah.

Really, who cares? It's ridiculous the head games I play with myself.

Yes, I do have some pictures in my dumpster of a guest room, waiting to be hung up. Don't harass me.

Sometimes it's not the decisions, but instead the act of finishing a project. I don't know the psychology behind it, and really I probably don't care, but starting projects is great fun. Finishing projects is a drag. Especially if it's something that you haven't had time to touch for over a year and so you have the added task of having to figure out where you left off before you can start again. Blah! My Guest Dumpster has a lot of those babies piled atop the bed.

Lucky for me, Aunt Marcia is visiting for Thanksgiving so I have to get in there and deal with it.

Oh yes,  I'm supposed to be talking about lunch box ID tags. How easily I babble off into a tangent.

Just in case you are wondering why lunch boxes need ID tags, I'm going to tell you about my kids. Zoe Bug has never lost her lunch box. She is my responsible, conscientious, compliant child. Stinkerbell loses her lunch box at least once a week. And she has the attitude that it's not her problem. The nerve of that child. Last year she had a Star Wars lunch box--and so did every boy in her class. This year she got a Plain Jane, or John, black lunch box. And I'm thinking about beribboning it with sparkly ribbons and doodads. Because I'm a little bit passive aggressive.

So the ID tags are required in order to keep that vein in my temple from bulging, giving me an embolism, and thus ending my life. It's for my health. And possibly Stinkerbell's.

These tags are made out of the same wood I used to make the backpack ID tags, except they are half the size. Peanut Head cut one of the wood pieces in half for me, and I just gave them a couple sloppy coats of acrylic paint. I probably should have sanded the wood first, but I didn't see the point in making them beautiful when potentially they will be subjected to rotting food and violence in the classroom lunch crate.

The lunch crate is a scary place. I came back from summer vacation to discover two rotting lunch boxes had been left in my lunch crate, and one of them had a yogurt in it. Blech!

Anyway, two coats of paint, another coat of MOD Podge (I have to force myself to say it that way because I'm so bitter about the Mod Podge scandal) to keep the paint from bleeding onto the picture, slap a not-so-attractive school picture atop that mess, and hit it with another coat of MOD Podge, allowing time to dry between each coat. I repeated that scenario for the back of the tags where I wrote the girls' names, teachers, and room numbers on a sticker.

There's nothing fancy about these tags. They are pure function. But you can make yours cute if you want. I just can't since I know what happens in the lunch crate. It's spooky.

Holding Hands

I just finished a project that I started eight and a half years ago, right after Stinkerbell was born. We knew The Stink was going to be our last baby, so that knowledge is what prompted me to trace all of our hands. Stinkerbell was a bruiser and I wanted to get her hand traced while she was still little.

On Mother's Day of the same year, Peanut Head gave me the sweetest card ever. It said "Sometimes just holding hands is holding on to everything."

I'm not normally a sappy person, but that just melted my heart and I knew the sentiment had to go with our hand outlines. 

I only wish it hadn't taken me eight years to put it all together.