Horses and Slime

Mark came home from work one day with an idea in his little head, he wanted a horse. What? No thank you. There are horses all around us out here and I love it but I don't want to own one. He thought we could own one and keep it in our neighbors stall. "All we'd have to do is clean the stall and feed it, plus pay for the stall." Again, no thanks. We settled on letting the kids have some horse riding lessons. We headed over for family night a couple weeks ago and it was a lot of fun. I took a lot of pictures so I'll let them do most of the talking.

Taking the horse to brush her and get the saddle put on.

Leila liked her.

I love how Leila will reach for your hand when you hold it out to her.

Leila loved the dirt.

Mark got on the horse and went for a ride! The tighter you squeeze your legs the faster the horse goes, well when it starts going fast your instinct is to tense up and squeeze your legs, he quickly learned. :)

This is what happens when I give Mark the camera. :)

That night I thought it would be fun to make a "spooky dinner", alien eyeballs (meatballs with peas for eyes), over intestines (spaghetti), and brains (brussel sprouts.) Honestly, they didn't think it was that cool. Charlie kept saying "those aren't eyeballs, those aren't brains!" They didn't get into it like I thought they might. When we came home from horse back riding we had green slime (home made vanilla pudding with food coloring) with dirt (crushed oreos.) They got a little more into that. Charlie thought it was cool that he ate it and realized it wasn't really slime and dirt. Then he reassured Kenya that it wasn't slime and dirt and it tasted good.

Here they are eating their slime. Love Kenya's teeth. She gets food in them like this like you wouldn't believe.

Pumpkins

We made our annual trip to the pumpkin patch. My camera battery was dead so the iphone had to do.

Charlie was more interested in running in the hay maze and playing with a couple friends from school, we just went and picked our pumpkins without him because he wasn't listening. Anyone have any advice on how to get this kid to listen? I am out of patience. He found us just as we were finishing up.

I ended up spray painting some of my pumpkins black, I saw it on pinterest and thought they looked really cool carved with the orange glow inside. Problem is we never got around to carving our pumpkins this year. Whoops.

On my early morning Saturday run this summer I came across these chairs at a garage sale for $10. I finally got around to painting them.

I heard a knock on the door one morning, I opened it up to find this...

Kenya just got home from preschool and picked this pumpkin in her teachers patch. She insisted she keep it her room.

Fall Harvest

For years when fall rolls around I've wanted to do some canning but I've never done it before and it is quite intimidating to me. This year we had a good amount of tomatoes and I wanted to make salsa, luckily my neighbor Chelsa invited me over to make some with her, she had already made a batch and had the steamers, so we did our batches together and now I'm not so intimidated by it. It turned out great too. Then I talked another friend into canning peaches with me. She showed me the ropes on that one too. It really is so simple and it's fun to do it with a friend. Next year we will hopefully be able to pick our peaches before the birds get to them (they ate all our peaches this year, we were devastated, we were so excited to pick them, this was the first year our tree produced peaches.) Our apple trees did pretty good though. They took a lot longer to ripen than we thought but we are now enjoying them. I picked the last of them today. We had a good amount of beets and peas this year but our brussel sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli either didn't work or had bugs all over them. We planted pumpkins, squash, watermelon, and zucchini, it all got washed away with our extremely wet spring.

Mark and I are learning as we go, every year we gain a little more knowledge so here's to a better crop next year.

Soccer Boy

Charlie really enjoyed playing soccer this year. It'll probably be his last year since he wants to start playing football next year which is too bad because he is starting to get pretty good. If you ask him, he'll tell you too. He's on the edge of confidence/cockiness, a little pet peave, cockiness has always turned me off. We're trying to get him to understand where the line is. At the same time he can be very hard on himself, saying stuff like "I'm not good at anything." So it's a delicate balance for me of building him up and keeping him humble. Hmmm....not easy.

Anyway, back to soccer. I think he scored at least one goal every game. He did great.

If one of his friends or he scored a goal they would do this.

Charlie hyper extended his knee when another kid ran into him, Mark had to grab him off the field, he was fine after a couple minutes.

Undefeated! A great season. I felt so bad though, their last game got rescheduled a couple times and I thought the message said their game was 6:30. We showed up at the field at 6:20 realizing that the game was at 5:30. Terrible, terrible mom moment. I felt awful. He was so excited to play in his last game. He played for one minute before it was over. At least he was there to get his medal and surprisingly he had a pretty good attitude about it when I told him how sorry I was and that it was my fault.