Fall Festivities

We just barely fit in our annual trip to the Underwood Family Farm in Moorpark this year. Amy and I have taken the kids there for the last several years, always on a weekday because admission is a fourth of the weekend price, and it's a lot less crowded. However we discovered this year that these kind of weekday activities are a little harder to plan with the girls in school.

We managed to meet up there after school just a couple days before Halloween. The advantage of this was the lack of crowds, the disadvantage was that the kids were pretty tired when we got there. My plan to have Caleb nap in the car on the drive out there backfired when he fell asleep about 5 minutes before we arrived. Hence the reason he is not smiling in any of the pictures.

Amy and Silas were the first ones to the haystack at the center of the corn maze

Almost a smile!

Mr. Silas, I think his favorite part of the day was his first pony ride, the boy was ecstatic!

BFF's

And this is the best picture we could get at the end of the day with two very tired kids:

As for Halloween, Hannah decided quite a while ago that she wanted to be a cheetah. Between online tutorials for making ears and a tail, and an animal print dress and leggings from Walmart, I managed to get a costume together.
Caleb's costume has a long history. It's always been called a leopard costume, although I'm not sure what would distinguish it as a leopard versus, say, a cheetah.

Anyway, it was made my my mom's cousin for her child and then given to my mom. I was the first one in our family to wear it and all the kids since have had a turn. At first Caleb was rather bothered by the tail, but then decided it was fun to chew on. I didn't think he'd keep the cap on but he never took issue with that. We have also learned that he LOVES candy, particularly chocolate. He knows which jar is the candy jar and will frantically point at it and yell until we either move it out of sight or give him a little. It's now permanently out of sight on a high shelf.

I'm glad to be past Halloween and just enjoying the fall season (now that it's almost over), thinking of things we're thankful for, like this boy: