Eckerts Farm

It hardly feels like Halloween is next weekend here. Our temperatures have been in the 70's and sometimes 80's, the sun has been shining, and we have been enjoying daily walks in the park. However, since it is almost Halloween, we couldn't pass up on the opportunity to join some friends for an outing to Eckert's Farm.

We took advantage of many photo spots and included some or our favorites.

Here are the girls with their friend, Haydn.
We enjoyed a delicious breakfast at a little country cafe on the farm.

The kids enjoyed playing in this little playhouse, complete with pumpkins and corn to play with.

We found this guy sitting around and invited the girls to sit on his lap for a picture. They thought that was pretty neat.

We took a tractor ride out to the pumpkin patch and took a couple of pictures before hopping on the very next tractor ride back. It was dry and very windy out there which made for a lot of dirt in our eyes. Since neither family planned on buying a pumpkin, we were happy to get out of there as quickly as possible. We just wanted to take the kids on the tractor ride.

The wind wasn't any better once we got back from our tractor ride, but at least there wasn't as much loose dirt around to blow up in our eyes.

We bought some tickets and let the kids go on some carnival rides to finish the morning off. Alyssa loved this boat ride.

Ashley and Haydn loved this airplane ride.

And Alyssa and Ashley loved the swing ride so much that they chose to ride it twice.

It was a fun morning out and even though the weather forecasts said we would get rained on, we didn't feel a drop (although it would have been much appreciated out in the pumpkin patch). The weather even warmed up to the high 70's by the time we left around noon. Thank you Roe Family for inviting us along.

Decorating Pumpkins

In order to avoid having to spend $10+ per pumpkin this year at a pumpkin patch, I went to our local grocery and got these babies for $2 each. A pretty good deal in my opinion for a night of fun decorating. Ashley loved painting her pumpkin with all of the colors of paint that we own. We can't figure out why she always ends up with paint all over her face and in her hair when she paints.

This princess dress-up kit was purchased for 50 cents and very much enjoyed by our little princess girl.
However, she didn't want to miss out on the fun of painting it too.

Ashley's finished pumpkin was very colorful and thickly painted. She likes to use the paintbrush like a spoon when she gets paint on it. It makes for a big mess.

Alyssa's finished pumpkin looked almost like the picture on the kit.

Now they are sitting on our doorstep and Alyssa's pumpkin has a few less accessories due to the foam pieces losing their stickiness and who-knows-what popping that balloon bubble. We love this time of year.

Our New Addition

Danny finally gave me something that I have wanted for a long time now. We figured with Alyssa turning 5 in a couple of months that it was a good time for it. Here is our new addition...

Danny found it on Craigslist. When we were going over to look at it, I didn't have high expectations. We had a 2 month period awhile back where we looked at a lot of pianos that were advertised on Craigslist and none of them felt right to me. When I sat down to play this piano, I felt a lot better about it than I had with any in the past. It is badly in need of a tuning job, but it sounds good to me considering. We think it will be a good piano for us as we are teaching our kids how to play and keeping the little ones from touching it. It is a definate improvement from the keyboard that I have been using to practice for the past 5 years.
Alyssa has shown a lot of interest in the piano recently and since this one has been in our home, she has asked me numerous times to teach her new song to play. I will probably find her some piano books to give her for Christmas and then start teaching her for real after that. So far it has mostly been "Chopsticks" and some other simple songs like that.

Another 5K

I ran another 5K on Saturday. We started training for this race during the first week of August. Our original plan was to run it in under 30 minutes and that's what we attempted to train for. Due to our vacation and Rachel, my ruinning buddy, getting sick 3 weeks before the race, we lowered our expectations and decided that just doing better than the last race was good enough for us. However, I think both of us thought in our minds that we might not even do better than last time. Ashley giving me a good luck hug.
Because this race was in October, they invited participants to dress up on costumes. Rachel and I laughed about it and wondered how anyone could run a 5K in a costume. Apparently it can be done.

All I know is that I would not have wanted to run in this costume.

Here I am crossing the finish line (Gray shirt, black pants).

Around the 1 mile marker, we realized that our original goal of finishing in under 30 minutes was actually a possibility. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. My finish time was 30:20, just over my original goal. I was a little bit dissappointed, but still happy that I cut 57 seconds off from the last race. Here I am after the race.

Rachel is a good exercise buddy for me. It's nice having someone to motivate me to exercise daily. We had planned on this being our last race for awhile, but having finished so close to 30 minutes, we are thinking about running another race in November to see if we can reach our goal of under 30 minutes.

Playdough

We are going through a playdough phase in our house. I can't remember how it started. I just remember something happening that encouraged me to pull out the long hidden playdough. However, when I found it and pulled it out, I realized that my playdough stash was all dried out. So I used a recipe that Gawbie passed on to us a long time ago and made our own homemade playdough (it is a recipe that uses kool-aid for the coloring). I even let Alyssa pick out the color. She picked her favorite color, purple, which also happened to be grape flavored. It turned out pretty good and has provided for hours of entertainment since. Alyssa loves that it smells good.
We had these playdough toys with the dried-up stash that we had gotten in a happy meal or something a long time ago. The girls love using them to make "cookies" and faces in their dough.

It makes a big mess of our kitchen floor and table, but they sure love playing with it.