Pumpkins, Parties, and Pudding

Happy October!  

We've been having fun, and as you'll see below, eating a lot of sugar.  

Ira has been obsessed with cars for months now, so I've been looking forward to making a car cake for his birthday in January.  That is, until he's broadened his horizons to include trains and trucks, both of which would also make really fun cakes.  So, I wanted to clear the car cake space in my brain so I could move on with other January plans.  Below is Ira's non-birthday cake: my second attempt at using fondant.

Ira was especially thrilled with the eyes.  When he ate the headlights he started calling the tires eyes and just sat at his high chair talking about them, not really eating anything. 

Ira helping Dad fix his bike.  Ant's bike has had a couple of run ins with the insane pot holes around here.

Dirt pudding!

We had lots of fun with our pumpkin carving party.  Unfortunately I forgot to take pics of our friends that came, but a couple from the ward and a friend from work showed up.

Jello Brain.  Maybe it's all those psychology classes in college, but I really look forward to making this thing every year.  When Ira's old enough I'll use it to lecture him about the difference between the prefrontal cortex and the occipital lobe. 

Cookies:  Ira seems to young to be spooked out by anything that's supposed to be spooky...fortunately.  He's recently kind of grasped the idea of monsters, loves the scary giant in Obiyoyo, and when strangers try to get him to smile and say hello, he usually responds with a little roar.  

Back to the party.  Here are three of the final products.  Left to Right: Anthony's, mine, then Maurice's.  My owl turned out kind of lame in comparison.  I even forgot the beak.  But in my defense I was putting Ira to bed and making sure everyone had enough cider.

Anthony's pumpkin not lit up.  I know, looks kind of crazy.  So cool when lit up though!  He found a way to take a photo on the computer and morph it into a pumpkin stencil.  He picked a kind of piggish picture of Ira and worked from there.  

Ira playing in the leaves after church.

In other news:

* We've been bowling every Tuesday night with Anthony's co-workers.  One of his teem-mates has never showed up, so I'm the sub.  Everyone's really nice despite my low average.  But this week I broke my record with 116!  Woohoo!  I think my average is 75, and somehow our team is in first place right now...out of maybe 15 teams?

*  Ant's project is moving along.  He has a big project that seems to be progressing.

* The pregnancy is going well.  I feel pretty great, just sleepy still.  We babysat a friend's 3 month old this week and Ira was really cute with him.  He spent most of his time bringing toys to him, blowing him kisses, and talking about his eyes.  Hopefully he'll be as excited when our baby comes.

*  Ira's cute as ever.  Not as excited about the potty lately, but saying a bunch of new words.  I'm worried I won't be able to get his Halloween Costume on.  Every time I whip it out, he runs away with an assertive "NOOOOOOO!"  Oh well.  Have a good week everyone!

Sharon

Fall Festival

Every place we move we try to get a feel for the community. Belleville had a family Fall Festival event yesterday and we decided to check it out. They had closed off the block where the Belleville history museum and library sit and people had set up a few little tables with activities and arts and crafts. They had a miniature old steam engine that looked like a tractor/train that was hooked up to a little corn husker or some sort of harvester. Ira really liked that. There was also a good showing from the local art community, which is amateur at best, but very expressive of the personality of the community.

Sharon and Ira at the Belleville Museum.

 They had some old chores for everyone to try out. I tried out the corn husker.

 Sharon took a stab at hand washing and ringing the clothes. It helped her appreciate our little and often less than stellar, but automatic washing and dryer.

 We even found a job Ira could do.

 The main street was lined with scarecrows that local businesses had created.

 The tin man - a little bit of irony in that one

 A weird moose thing

It was a classic small town America event, that made us want to go jump in a pile of leaves and go ask strangers for candy.  Ah, autumn. 

Wasem Fruit Farm and Talladay Farm

We returned to the Wasem Fruit Farm with a friend from work and his fiance. The homemade donuts are awesome, we need to get there earlier so we have more of a selection than cinnamon sugar. 

 There is always a line for the homemade donuts, apple cider, and fresh fruit. We can't resist it though.

 Ira in the miniature kids maze. He didn't quite get what to do, but we eventually made it through. 

We also found a great groupon for the farm next door, Talladay Farm, and their huge corn maze.

 Ira helped me navigate. I wanted to do it without the map, but I got out voted, so we did the challenge of finding all the 'hidden' posts.

Sharon, Beth, and John trying to figure out where we were.

It was a fun afternoon activity and Ira did really well. It made me feel very... Midwestern and got me in the fall mood.

Family Fall Visit

Grandma and Grandpa Quinn came and visited a few weeks ago. We had a lot of fun showing them around the area, especially with the fall colors starting to emerge.

Kent Falls with the family

 While I was working on Friday Sharon took the family apple picking. Yum.

 We made a random last minute stop at this old machinery museum. Kind of random, but they had a lot of old trucks. My grandpa's would have loved this place.

 The fall colors have been wonderful this year, especially when the sun comes out.

 Ira loved seeing Grandma and Grandpa

Ira's starting to figure out he's dad is kind of crazy.

We did a bunch of hiking and Ira spent a lot of time in the backpack chill'n. He was a good sport about it.

Pilgrimages

We love ice-cream and so we made our pilgrimage to Ben & Jerry's original factory in Northern Vermont.

Getting There

 We left a warm blue sky Connecticut with our hopes high and camp ground reserved. Just before pulling into camp at 9:30pm the rain started to come down hard. Upon arrival we opted to transform our little 2-door Honda Civic into a bed instead of putting up a tent on the already wet ground in the pouring rain. It was an interesting night.... Sharon says that she felt just like the Princess and the Pea, only the pea was a spare tire and the 100 mattresses was a skinny piece of foam. 

But I think Ira loved it. He is such a good traveling kid.

Fall Colors, local farms, and Applefest

Before visiting the factory we took some back roads and visited a small cheese shop, sooo good. The owner told us about a local 'Applefest' going on up the hill, to the right, and the third 'driveway' to the left. We  checked it out.

 They were making some Apple Cider. You can see the apple dicer in the background and the apple 'musher' or three garbage disposals mounted on a table

They poured the mush onto a press and squeezed the apple juice out for the cider.  They used the cider to make some amazing donuts and cider syrup.  We also got some local goat milk caramel sauce.  Yum.

The fall colors were great even though the peak was a week earlier and the storms during the week had brought a lot of the leaves down.

Some creative Grafiti out in the middle of nowhere VT. We thought it was funny though. 

Ben & Jerry's Factory

 Ben & Jerry's had a cow directing parking traffic, perfect.

The weather was a little brisk, but it's never too cold for ice-cream, right? The tour was pretty fun, the best part was the free samples at the end. The flavor of the day was Chocowlate Chip. Vanille Ice-cream with fudge bits shaped like cows, pretty tasty.

 Father and Son pose in sheer happiness.

Sharon, VT

We drove right by Sharon, VT on our way to Ben & Jerry's so on our way home we decided to stop by, not because Sharon shares it's name.

 It is the birth place of Joseph Smith, Jr. A man we believe to be called of God to be a prophet in these modern times; given authority to speak and reveal the will of God and to bring men closer to Christ.

 There is a nice visitors center, this monument, and a few old remnants of the houses his parents and grandparents lived in.

Fall Fun

This fall has been rather enjoyable. This is the beautiful view on our back porch. Sharon has also written an update, so I will keep this short as we have a lot of overlap.

School: I survived the first half of the semester. I front loaded it, so I would have more time the last half to work on my capstone project. This has turned out to be a good thing because no one else on my team seems to have time to get things done, so it's good one of the six of us is thinking about it. That made it sound really bad, but it isn't that bad, it just feels that way some times. Tomorrow we have a major milestone due, that will be a good measure of how much effort everyone has been putting in. I've been enjoying my last classes, trying to get as much as I can out of school before I'm done.

Pregnancy: Sharon is doing well. I am amazed at how easy she makes being pregnant look. I always thought women got moody and cranky when they were pregnant, but so far life has been good. That could change as we enter the 3rd trimester. Everyone has been asking for a belly shot, so we came up with this idea on our walk.

Jobs: Sharon gave a good update on this. The job hunt has been taking a lot of time, about the equivalent to a whole other class. It could have been worse if I were traveling for more interviews; fortunately few companies are flying candidates out for on-site interviews. I guess that comes with difficult economic times. If the executives can't get flown around, why new hires? It's looking like Pittsburgh, Connecticut, or Boston could be potential landing spots for us right now. I've been reading about Connecticut the most and liking the possibility, except for the cost of living.

Fun: We did our annual pumpkin carving. As we were leaving DC we found we found ourselves wondering if they would be smashed when we got home. We took that as an omen. When we got back, they were gone. Down the street a ways we found remnants of pumpkin, but there was no way of identifying if they were ours, just the circumstantial evidence.











In my opinion this fall has been much better than last fall. I don't know if last year my head was down more or what, but fall this year has been spectacular. We've been able to get out and enjoy it more too. There is a great park near our house that drops into a ravine so you can't hear or see much of civilization. It was nice walking along the path and enjoying the trees. It was a nice calm day with little gusts of wind that would come and blow through the trees knocking dozens of leaves off the branches. The leaves would then slowly and peacefully float down to the ground. It reminded me of watching snow fall in the lamp light in front of our house when I was growing up. It made me happy.

Going back to DC was nice. I really liked Georgetown. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal ride was fun. I liked when they filled the lock to bring the boat up to the next level. It was cool that they still had the original tow paths and had mules to pull us along for most of the tour. I wish they did longer tours. I liked learning about the history of the canal too. We were lucky to catch it on the last weekend of the year. If anyone is in DC when it is running I commend it.

I'm looking forward to the next few weekends. We are going to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and a ballet called Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project. So we should have some good updates/reviews coming up soon.

For more fun photos you can see our online photo album.