Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween!

 

 

Martha Stewart I Am Not

Historically, I am the first mother to sign up for the apple cider on the party food list. However, this year, thanks to Pinterest making projects look so incredibly easy, I decided to try for 'cool mom' status.  See this guy below......he will be joining the party table tomorrow. 

 

If you can't tell, he's an owl!

 Now before you get all impressed with my artistic abilities, let me explain the process that brought about these little wonders and further confirmed that I belong with the cider moms.  Looks simple right? Chocolate cupcake, Oreo and some Reese's Pieces.  Let's begin with frosting these little buggers: using the moist chocolatey cupcake mix is not a good idea when you are going to be frosting something.  Thankfully, after a few fails, I realized that you can cover over the frosting mistakes with the Oreo cookies. 

 Next up: the Oreos, and with all of the Oreos I have eaten in my life, I should have thought of this little problem before I started.  For those of you who have never eaten an Oreo before, those perfect little frosting circle centers happen in about every other cookie you open up, that is, if you don't break the darn thing in the process.  Good thing I bought the family pack.  Andy now has bowl full of broken Oreos to eat. (Buuuuurrrrrppp!)

Finally: Reese's Pieces do not stick to Oreo cookies all that well.  Oh well, live and learn. At least this year I can pretend that I am an amazing mom when we walk in with the cupcakes that turned out OK.  

Happiness

What I see when I walk though my back yard right now.

 

Raking

 

In case you have ever wondered why a four year old would help rake leaves.....

Putting the Beds to Rest

This Saturday was my first Saturday off since cross-country season began, so Lttle Man and I spent the day putting the gardens to rest for the winter.  Little Man helped dig the carrots out of the ground and then spent the rest of the time digging for worms to feed the chickens. 

 

Once the grasshopper he found jumped out of his hand, he spent the next ten minutes jumping in the raised bed after it.  It was very comical and I wish that there had been a video camera rolling while he was hopping around the garden bed, but as always, the best moments are never caught on tape. 

 

We then harvested our three sad pumpkins for the front steps.  Little Man is very proud of his pumpkin growing abilities; I think I'll wait until later to tell him they are supposed to be all orange.  Oh well, maybe next year.  Right now I'll let him think he is the world's greatest farmer. 

 

Another Down, Many More to Go

My fifth half marathon done and completed; 2 hours 4minutes and 2 seconds (I am the one in the bright green).  So far this is my best half marathon time.  One of these days I am actually going to break the 2 hour mark. 

Complete Contrast

There are moments in my life when I realize that the blog title "Haphazardly" may be the perfect fit for this blog.  While we try to foster good habits in our family, we have these completely off moments where we do the complete opposite.  For example, this past week I had Yom Kippur off from work and the rain got in the way of our long hike plans. Rather than hike up a mountain, we decided to walk through the trails and fields at one of our local parks.  We looked at all the changing leaves, followed some caterpillars around, looked for frogs in the pond, sat in the middle of the woods and listened to the wind blowing though the trees, and sat in the middle of a field opening up milkweed pods.  It was a wonderful, completely-in-tune-with-nature morning.  Then............

We ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant. 

 

Another great example(also this past week or so) was going apple picking with Little Man. Once again fostering those healthy eating habits, supporting a local business and just having a great time as a family. Then a week later...........

A visit to the world's largest candy counter. 

As you can see we are still a work in progress and apparently have a long way to go to get where we need to be.