Fall Fun

After our Morning on the Green at Northwestern, the boys and I spent some time playing in the backyard, enjoying the sunshine. Ryan was excited that some of our neighbor's leaves had blown into our yard (our trees are tiny) and wanted to rake a big leaf pile. I am all for "recreational raking," I'm just glad we don't have to do any serious leaf management for the next few years.

To complete our festive fall day, that afternoon, Ryan convinced me we needed to carve some pumpkins. The boys had gotten some pumpkins from one of my mom's friends when they were at her house one day, so we had a few out for decoration and Ryan picked out 2 that he thought would make a perfect Angry Bird and accompanying Piggy. As predicted, picking out the design and pumpkin were as much as Ryan participated and I found myself solo-carving a pumpkin on our driveway with several neighborhood kids looking on.

The pumpkins proved to be too thick for the light to glow through on the areas with just peeled skin, so these were a bit of a fail, but you can't win them all (a good lesson learned by Adults who are asked to help a 4-year-old pass an Angry Birds level only to realize we are completely ill-equipped to pass anything but the easiest levels).

Although Ryan wouldn't touch any of the slimy stuff, he was keen on collecting pumpkin seeds with grand plans to plant our very own pumpkin patch in the backyard. When I explained that pumpkins need a lot of room to grow and we don't even have a garden, he compared me to "The Little Old Lady Who Didn't Like Pumpkins." I think he was combining two books: The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything and Too Many Pumpkins. Anyway, his creative insult made me laugh (and we conveniently remembered that fall isn't the best time to plant pumpkins anyway so we just "saved" the seeds for Spring.)

We had a great day celebrating Fall!