There's Treasure Everywhere

One Friday afternoon in mid October we went to a pumpkin patch with our good friends, the Meisters. We were meeting them at the pumpkin patch, but we had some time to kill after we picked up Ellie from school so we went to the mall. Going to the mall means one thing for Andy...Cinnabon. The kids were on board.

Then we met up with the Meisters. The Meisters have become like family to us in the past year, and we love getting to spend time with them.

We went on the hayride first.

Did I mention that this pumpkin patch also had a field of sunflowers? Beautiful!

The five kids went through the corn maze.

There was a little petting zoo. We didn't pay to go in, but this guy wanted to say hi.

Fall picture with pumpkins? Check.

Ellie and Abigail.

The sunflowers were beautiful. You could cut them for $2 a flower.

We had to take advantage of all the pretty flowers and take lots of pictures...

After the pumpkin patch, we went back to our house and then walked down to Mr. Taco for dinner. We booked it back home after dinner and went to Zachary's flag football game, which was super fun. Then, on the way home from the game we stopped by some amazing houses decorated for Halloween. A few houses in a row did a "Pirates of the Caribbean" theme, and it looked like a movie set. It was definitely a night to remember!

My friend Cheryl, who has faithfully read my blog from the very beginning, emailed me to tell me that today is my 15th blogging anniversary! Who knew?! Actually I often think about fifteen years ago this time of year because it brought so much change into our lives. At the end of September 2006 we moved from Albuquerque to Southern California, Andy started his new job, I started the blog (with Andy's huge help) mid-October, and Joey was born two weeks later!

I remember back in 2006 when blogs were just starting to become a thing. I thought they were so lame, but I'm always reluctant to embrace new technology. I thought email and texting both sounded pretty dumb as well. Why wouldn't you just call someone?! Apparently I'm a little resistant to change. ;-)

A bunch of my friends in Albuquerque had all started blogs in the middle of 2006, and they really wanted me to start one. Again, I thought this was silly because I lived near them so I didn't need a blog to share about what was going on in my life. I did know that we would soon be moving away, so I promised that when we moved I would start a blog. Thanks to my super sweet, techy husband who designed (and redesigned) my blog, I had a brand new blog on October 14, 2006.

Now I'm one of only two or three other people that I know (in real life) that still have blogs. I actually feel outdated if it ever comes up that I have a blog. There have been a few times over the years when I thought about quitting, or when I didn't blog much, but I'm SO thankful I stuck with it. Little did I know, it would turn into our family's virtual scrapbook. And not just virtual. Every 1-2 years I use blog2print.com to turn my blog into a real, hardback book, about the size of a high school yearbook.

This is how many we have now!

We put a fun picture on the back of each one from that year.

I've mentioned this before, but over the years, the kids have loved reading the blog books. It tends to be a summer activity when they have lots of time to lounge around and read. A lot of their "memories" are really just from reading about things in the books. And we all have our favorites from "The Things They Say." I would never have remembered half of those sayings if not for the blog books.

Today I was thinking about how much longer I will blog for. I'm assuming I'll do it until all the kids are out of the house. That's probably my goal. I want to have all of my kids' childhood documented in those books. But after that, who knows. Maybe I'll be blogging up a storm during our empty nest and retirement years! That thought makes me laugh.

So happy anniversary to my blog, and a special shout out to Cheryl, Rosaline, and Deb. You are my three faithful readers that aren't actually related to me. It's fun that you guys are still reading!

Every six weeks Ellie's school has a school-wide field trip. Last year during Covid, they only had online field trips, so we just did our own thing. This year, they have regular field trips again so I signed up for the first one to Julian, a cute little town about an hour east of us. The theme of the field trip was all things Johnny Appleseed.

We rotated through different stations.

Our first station was learning songs and dances from that time period. It was surprisingly fun. At one point "Johnny" called Ellie and another boy up to model a dance for everyone.

Another neat station was the cider press. The guy taught us about the different kinds of apples, and how you make apple cider, hard cider, and apple cider vinegar.