Days Gone By

My favorite fall month is almost over. The weather is perfect, our pace of life is just right, and the holidays are getting closer. Right now the east coast is bracing for a super storm, but out here it's just another day in paradise. :)

Braylen and Daddy made an awesome landform project, don't you think?
Can you see the blur in the background? It's Kaleb!

The kids have been making me laugh all month long. Much of this laughter centers around a certain pumpkin that one of my little sweeties picked out. Grandma takes them out for pumpkins and cookies every fall, and can you believe what one of my sons brought home?

I have a friend who speaks in puns, and she asked me if we found this pumpkin in the "rear" of the store. She also said people must "crack up" when they drive by our house. :) Around here we refer to this as the butt pumpkin, and decided not to carve a face into it. Use your imagination to come up with some of the other things our boys would like to do with this pumpkin...

Aaron is super happy with his pumpkin. Thanks Grandma!
He calls it the third biggest pumpkin in our state. :)

Other ways my kids have made me laugh this month:
A conversation out of the blue between Aaron (at the sink) and Kaleb (in the shower.)
Aaron: "Look at the bright side, Kaleb. You're not ugly, and you have a nice brother--one nice brother."
Kaleb: "No, I have two nice brothers!"

With just Aaron in the car with me one day, we pulled up to a stoplight and this is what I hear from him: "The most beautiful curve on a woman's body is her smile." After a second of panic at the beginning of his sentence, I realize he's reading a billboard message that is behind me. :)

How can I not love living this life I've been given to live?! :)

Let's see...what else have we been doing this month? One night we had someone pound on our door at 2:30am. Then the doorbell began to ring. Braylen looked out his window, felt relieved to see a police car in the driveway, and went back to bed. (Most people would not feel relieved at that sight.) Turns out Derek was called out in the middle of the night and this was the PD's way of reaching him. I didn't even wake up until Derek turned the lights on. The life of a law enforcement officer and his family...

We've been checking Derek's trail camera every Saturday, and setting up tree stands for deer season. One thing I love about this is picking up lunch on our way home. What a treat. Saturday lunches are much more fun when I don't have to fix them. :) Derek took Kaleb and Aaron turkey hunting, while Braylen's been pheasant hunting with a friend and also with his uncle. He brought home a chucker and it was just enough meat for his supper one night. Derek and the rest of the guys in our family spent one afternoon chopping firewood. We won't need to gather firewood again for a long, long time.

The fun with firewood continued at our house the day after gathering it in the field.

Since we love pumpkins so much, we visited a pumpkin patch one Sunday. I'm sure my younger two boys would have loved a traditional patch with a slide and a corn box. But we decided to save money and time and visit a patch with just pumpkins this year. It was free, we had fun, and we came home with lots of pumpkins.

Aaron's always loved little pumpkins!

Braylen

Porch pumpkins

More porch pumpkins and Aaron of course!

And this post has gone on long enough! Happy October! :)