Celebrating Fall

As usual, we have been quite busy this fall season with all our festivals and parties. Joe and I usually love this time of year and look forward to all of our traditions, but I will admit, it has been a bit more trying with a new baby in tow! Owen has been a trooper with this mad family he has been born into!! We have already been to the Indian Summer Festival (which was very hot!), the Jack O'Lantern Spooktacular (which was very cold!), the Great Pumpkin Patch (which was very windy!), Where are the Wild Things at the Illinois State Museum, and our play group Halloween party (which was very loud!). And just for good measure we threw in a trip to the St. Louis Zoo. We did miss one Halloween party due to illness and still have a couple more Halloween celebrations to go before the actual event of trick-or-treating, not to mention carving our pumpkins! The Jack O'Lantern Spooktacular was a first for us this year and it was wonderful!! It is held at the Washington Park Botanical Gardens and it is an amazing walk through 2008 lit Jack O'Lanterns! The number will increase every year as the number of pumpkins matches the year. Jenna's preschool class craved a pumpkin for the event, but in all honesty we could not find it amongst the other 2007 pumpkins but we had so much fun looking for it! Despite getting to the pumpkin patch later in the month we were still able to pick our own pumpkins from the patch. This is always a fun time watching the kids critique every pumpkin they find wondering if the next one they find might be better. Normally our pumpkins reflect our position in the family - Joe's is the biggest, then mine, then Alex's, then Jenna's, and Owen's would be the smallest this year. But Alex threw that out the window this year and got the biggest pumpkin! He can lift bigger pumpkins so why not go with the biggest?! Halloween costumes were much easier this year. Alex is a pirate and is wearing a costume he already had but we did buy him a new sword and Jenna is finally the ghost she has always wanted to be! As for Owen, we have slimmed him down by putting a skeleton onesie on him...it glows in the dark!! While we have enjoyed our busy season Joe and I have decided to ease up a bit during the Holiday season, stay home more and really just take in our incredible kids - to have fun with them, to play with them, to make great memories with them!