I got one!

After cheating the other day, I got an honest-to-goodness falling leaf picture!  Check it out - you are sure to be impressed.

You are so jealous.  I can tell.

I cannot drive by this little old church in the fall and not stop to take a picture.  It compels me so.

I have dozens of nearly identical pictures on my hard drive.  And yet I still stop the car and pull out the camera.

Hydrangeas are almost as bad.

I used to hate hydrangeas.  Now I can't for the life of me figure out why I ever felt that way.  We have 10 or 11 plants scattered around our yard, I could easily go buy more every spring.  Oh, how I love them so.

Random leaf stuck in one of our many shrubs.  Unlike our hydrangeas, this shrub may not be around much longer.  It is a leaf magnet through the fall and winter.  It starts catching leaves in October, and they pile up in its branches and underneath it all through the winter and into May.  Cleaning it out is a pain, literally.  Do you see those thorns????  Ouch.  We have no love for this little beast.

This is our church cemetery.  Isn't it lovely?  And the farm in the background?  Hubby grew up there.  It has been in his dad's family for forever. 

I have read some good blog posts today.  I like this one, about living in the now, and the meaning and significance of the small things that we do.  I also like this one.  It is a beautifully written post about adoption, poverty, and God's heart for orphans and family.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!  We are off tomorrow to spend the day with a passel of junior high kids.  Should be fun!

homework

He looks so grown up when he does homework.  He's not a little boy any more!  Sniff.

falling leaves

Do you ever stand under a tree in the fall, camera in hand, trying to snap a picture of a falling leaf?  It's crazy-hard.

You might get some pretty awesome bokeh, though.  

But eventually, you get tired of running around chasing leaves, so you wander off and take pics of leaves that are still attached. 

You practice your sunflare/haze skills.

You go back and try the falling leaves again.

Obviously, this isn't going to work.  So you start to get sneaky.

You ignore the neighbors and folks driving by who are giving you funny looks.  You pretend it's perfectly normal behavior to be standing in the front yard, holding up leaves and then dropping them with one hand, while using the other to hold the camera and shoot pics.  And then you do it again, and again, and again. 

Eventually, you start to get the hang of it.

 

And, if you don't tell anyone about how you cheated, they'll think you have mad falling-leaf-capturing skillz. 

Have I mentioned that I love fall?

guess who came to school today

The Chick-fil-A cow!

pancake envy

I made pancakes for dinner on Friday night.  I thought I had pretty good pancake skills.  I cater to everyone's whims.  Hubby prefers plain, I prefer blueberry, Kiddo prefers chocolate chip.  I make everyone happy.  For Kiddo, instead of just randomly sprinkled chips, I make letters with the chocolate chips, spelling a word with three or four pancakes.  I even make them from scratch.  But today, I have pancake envy.  Take a look at this:

source:  Jim's Pancakes

Can you believe that is a pancake?  You should check out his blog - he has some AMAZING pancake creations.  Beehives, birdhouses, carousels, a bridge, even a potty pancake.  My chocolate chip pancakes seem so...so...amateur in comparison.  I'll never look at a pancake the same way again.

But his don't have blueberries or chocolate chips (well, except for the potty pancake...).

what we've been up to {this and that}

Trying out Hubby's new ipod touch - and getting tickled by the Dragon voice recognition software, which doesn't always do a great job of recognizing English - particularly 6-year-old English.

Helping paint murals in the children's Sunday School area at church (no, I didn't do all of this - there have been 5 or 6 ladies working together).

Watching movies.  Hubby and I really enjoyed this one.  But Kiddo didn't make it through more than 20 minutes - he got upset that the Daddy viking went away on a long trip and left Hiccup behind, and insisted we turn it off.  He has done that with several movies, now.  He seems to frighten easily - is that an autism thing or a lack-of-exposure-to-television-except-for-PBS thing?

Carving pumpkins and rooting for the Phils (although I've got Game 1 on right now and they are not dominating like I would like them to be...).

Here's our other pumpkin:

He used to have an eye.  But I cut it off.  It was an accident.  And I'm not planning on carving another pumpkin like this for a VERY long time.

Roasting pumpkin seeds.  Why are these not as good as I remember?  I remember them being really good when I was growing up, but these are just "fine."

Going to the park as a "Plan B" when we found out that the pumpkin festival that we were planning on going to no longer exists.  Isn't that an awesome-cool castle playground?  The dads were out in force today.   The wives must have kicked their families out of the house today.  There are four dads in this picture, several more sitting on the benches off to the left of the picture, and more crawling around with their kids inside. 

Oh, look!  There's a handsome one now!

Kiddo had a ball.  Sometimes "Plan B" turns out to be a pretty good alternative.

We've been working on our 30 Days of Gratitude project.  Here are some of the things we've been thankful for over the past week:

various family members
health
socks
glasses and contact lenses
board games
ducks
our jobs
our church
clean water
flowers
Wii
Chick-fil-A
matchbox cars
my camera
computer
cats

I have been in love with Fall this week.  The leaves are really starting to get some color, the pumpkins, gourds, mums, and other Fall-ish things are making their appearance, the lighting in the morning and late afternoon is just incredible (especially if I don't have my camera on me), and I get to pull the jeans and long sleeves and socks back out.  Love it, love it, love it!

our (not) sick day

Our school has a 24-hour fever-free policy.  As in, if your child has a fever of over 100 degrees, they must be fever-free for 24 hours before they can return to school.  Kiddo had a fever most of the day yesterday, so I kept him home this morning.  A precaution that was completely unnecessary, as it turns out.  He bounded out of bed this morning and went full-steam most of the day.  Whatever that virus was, it was short-lived.

I was rather disgruntled last night when I realized my plans for a productive day to myself were going to be thwarted (and yes, I was also concerned about a poor kid who felt miserable).  I mentally cut back on my list of "things I will get done tomorrow," but thought maybe I could get some quiet things done while Kiddo vegged on the couch, watching videos, reading books and playing Wii.  Then, when he burst into my room, full of energy this morning, my plans were changed again. While thrilled that he was feeling more like himself, I knew I was going to be kept on my toes all day, trying to keep him entertained.  Mumble grumble.  However, I was pleasantly surprised by a perfectly wonderful day with my boy. 

We...

ate breakfast in front of Curious George cartoons (and spilled breakfast all over the living room.  Oops.  Fortunately, it was just dry cereal and easily cleaned up),

painted a pumpkin,

played outside (drawing with sidewalk chalk while Mommy took pictures nearby and hunted for acorns),

made a quick trip to buy the new Bebo CD (call me old-school, but I still like buying the CD more than I do downloading it off of iTunes...especially when it's on sale for less than the MP3 download),

wrote his own (currently unpublished) blog post with the cats sleeping nearby,

 

wrote a story,

danced to Pandora with Mommy,

had a pillow fight with Daddy,

played Wii,

and read Frog and Toad stories before bed.

I am so glad he was home today, and was feeling good. We don't get those full days together very often any more, now that he is usually at school all day.  I had a great time just re-connecting with my little guy.  And I even got a load or two of laundry done. Sweet.