More Fall Fun

On Friday we headed out to a Fall Festival at our YMCA. The girls wore their costumes. As you can see, this year's costume theme is fire related-- Katie is a "firman of the world" (which is something she calls herself) and Caroline is a dalmation (or fire dog, as Katie calls her), which is very fitting for our dog lover. We had a funny moment before we left the house-- Jamie was helping Caroline into her costume and accidentally put it on backwards with the tail in the front. Once he realized his mistake he announced that Caroline was a boy dog and everyone was cracking up, although we don't know if the girls got the joke!

Caroline avoided napping at school last week so she was pretty tired by Friday evening. The festival (pronounced "festibal" by Katie) was from 7 until 9. After dinner we got ready as quickly as possible and raced over to the Y. We were there about 15 minutes early, but were lucky that they had started up and allowed us to get a head start and enjoy minimal waits in line for the pony and tractor rides.

Another highlight for the girls was the firetruck- and let me tell you our girls were popular with the firefighters who loved their costumes! As Caroline was losing steam we ran through the last of our to-dos (drink hot cider, collect a glowing bracelet, make s'mores) and headed out by about 7:45. We missed the costume parade and contest, but Caroline never would have lasted that long.







Saturday morning Jamie and I had a board meeting for the Notre Dame Alumni Club (we're co-presidents elect) and the girls had a babysitter. On the way back from our meeting we stopped and purchased some paint to decorate our pumpkins, which set the girls into a tizzy-- they could not stand to wait to do the painting. Katie spent about 15 minutes lining them up, dividing them (giving Caroline brown and white). As I was putting Caroline down for a nap I said after you rest you can paint. She laid her head down on the chair's armrest for 10 seconds, then popped back up and said "I rested!"

Once we did unleash them with the paints, they got very busy, very quickly. While we weren't looking Caroline grabbed the green paint and dumped a huge glob of it in her paint dish, so most of her pumpkin is green. Katie started off with a nice face and then got so engrossed in the whole painting process that she couldn't stop so it ended up a brownish-purple all over. Artists say that the key is to know when to stop, I think she just missed the optimum point!







Our adventure for Sunday was a trip to the country to pick apples. This involved another hayride- which was great and then they let us off in the orchard to get to work. We were excited to let the girls go to town, and then the staff there mentioned the words "poison ivy" which quickly changed our plan of attack. We picked two bags full of apples and then enjoyed the farm, which in addition to looking at the animals and the scenery, included eating apple fritters and apple cider. Caroline managed to spot the port-o-potty, and guess what she said? "I gotta go potty . . ."








After rest time Katie joined me in the "apple factory" and helped me make apple pie-- that's our peeler, coorer, slicer tool that Katie is using. People make fun of me for having it, but it is delightful and it literally peels, cores and slices the apple in one step. That barely made a dent in the apple supply, so we're going to have to get to work on some more cooking. The apples were delicious and we had a lot of little and big fingers in the bowl stealing bites!