Pumpkin Carving

Here's Rachael's pumpkin. It says I love Halloween. Cute idea. It was so posed to be a cat, but she accidentally cut a full circle out in the back.

This is Dylan's smiley face. His pumpkin doesn't stand up, so it lays sideways. I helped him with this one.

Here's my little baby pumpkin. It was too small to trace a picture on it.

This one is Cody's pumpkin. I traced the picture onto it, but he did all the rest on his own. He did an awesome job.

The fun part of pumpkin carving!

Oh what fun it is to carve pumpkins! Here's Dylan cleaning the seeds out of his and Rachael is working on getting the top off of hers.

Okay, so I couldn't get the pictures in the order that I wanted them in for some reason, but here they are. Enjoy.

At the Pumpkin Patch Today

Today I took Rachael and Nicholas (my nephew) to the Pumpkin Patch. It was the perfect day for it. It was a little bit cold in the morning, but it didn't rain! We spent three and a half hours here having fun. The picture above is the two of them climbing back down from the Hay Pyramid. I think this was Rachael's favorite activity today because every time we walked by it, she had to climb up. Nicholas climbed up and then back down and was pretty much finished.
The Toy Tractors were a new event this year at this particular Pumpkin Patch and this was Nicholas' favorite activity. It was a little hard for him to pedal on the gravel, but with mine and Rachael's help he did pretty good. I had a hard time convincing him to see something else.
They both enjoyed the petting zoo. There were chickens, goats, turkeys, sheep, rabbits, a donkey, baby calves, geese and ducks.
After the Petting Zoo we went on a Tractor Ride to the Pumpkin Patch. Nicholas told me that he wants a tractor for his birthday when he gets bigger. It was so cute. The tractor dropped us off and Rachael grabbed a wheel barrow for us to collect our pumpkins in. We had to search long and hard to find good pumpkins, but we found some finally.
Nicholas wanted to ride a pony. He had so much fun on it. Rachael didn't want to ride one though, she thought she was too big to ride one. The sign said up to 80 pounds, but she didn't want to. After the pony ride we went into the Corn Maze. We wandered around for a while and finally followed some people to one of the exits. We didn't make it all the way through, but we gave it a try.
There was a Pumpkin Launch that we tried. Each person gets two tries. On my second try I made it into one of the buckets and won a prize. This was a total luck shot! I got to chose a Scare Crow decoration.

A Special Day

Yesterday I took the kids to my Niece's Princess Birthday party. Hailey is turning 4 on Tuesday. The last time the kids and I saw Hailey was at her first birthday party 3 years ago. (Which is what made this a special day.) When we arrived Hailey was just leaving with grandma (my step mom)and granny to get pizzas for the party. At this point she had no idea what was going on or who we were. While they were gone, Mellissa (my sister)and her boyfriend Chris got all the decorations and gifts out of the closets and set things up. The kids and I got to visit with Mellissa and Chris for an hour before they finally came back with the pizzas.
When Hailey came up stairs and saw us and the balloons, she got really shy. It took her awhile to leave her Grandma's side. We ate pizza and then she opened her gifts.

This is Mellissa and my kids waiting for Hailey to come back.
After all the gifts were opened, Hailey came around and started talking a little bit. Rachael helped her get all of her Barbie things out the box. These two had a really great time playing together the rest of the afternoon. We were the only other ones there, so we stayed and visited for several hours while the kids all played together.
Here's Dylan playing with Hailey on the stairs. Cody was at the bottom of the stairs tossing a ball to them. This was a really great day and I can't wait to do it again. Hopefully sooner than 3 years again.