Happy Halloween!

It has been a busy month, lots of fun fall activities. Tomorrow is Halloween and our family celebration activities are in full swing. School dance, school volunteering, church all night youth event, a few friends over on Halloween night, and my Sunday school Harvest party on Sunday. I am also looking forward to the huge amount of trick or treaters we get here, when we lived in the country we never had any, now we live in a part of town that gets a steady flow of trick-or-treating all night, it is so fun to see all the different costumes, and all the neighborhood is out, it is great. We fill a huge bin full of candy, and by the end of the night we are all out. These are some of our Halloween pictures, all our candy, two of my new favorite Halloween/Harvest Children's Books- Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper- amazing illustrations, and Strega Nona's Harvest by Tomie dePaola- one of my all time favorite children's writers, great story- as well as two old favorites- In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories classic scary stories from the 80's and Jack Prelutsky's It's Halloween- great catchy little poems and stories for Halloween, also a favorite from when I was young. I have also included a picture of one of the games I decided to play at our children's Harvest party- Pumpkin ring toss- using mini pumpkins and three embroidery hoops- fun and pretty challenging. Also a picture of Sarah and Joe- Sarah is dressed as a pirate to help out at her old elementary school trick or treat evening, and brother is doing what he can to get her to smile for the camera.

Hope everyone has an super fun Halloween!

Apple Festival

It has been a busy week and a half- we had a fun weekend celebrating my sons birthday together with his good friend, they are born 2 weeks apart and both turned 13 recently. My son was introduced to his first air soft war, and had a very good time playing at his friends property, then all the boys headed here for a fun sleepover. This week I also got the house decorated for Halloween- progress on my felting has been slow, I did embroider a nice felt mat to put under one of my Halloween trees. I have included pictures of a few of my Halloween decorations.

Today we enjoyed our town's annual Apple Festival- we have always visited some of this event but today was the first time I took the self-guided tours through the historic buildings- built in the mid 1800's. We had a ton of fun looking through the old farm equipment, and old kitchen stuff, the old children's toys were also cool. The buildings themselves were very fun to see, all the old style construction. We saw apple cider being pressed, tasted some good apple butter- apple cider and apple pie, and I as a needle crafter I really enjoyed the living history demonstrations of many different needle type crafts. One older women was making the most pretty lace using the old wooden bobbins- amazing! We went home with some locally grown apples which I will turn into apple butter tomorrow- all around a very fun fall weekend.