Friday, November 30, 2012

Fall is almost over

Now that fall is nearly over I feel that I must quickly blog about what we have done, especially now that tomorrow is December 1st.  We were able to find a few corn mazes to take the boys to.  One of the corn mazes we were joined by some friends and this made the maze so much more fun.  We also got to check out the Pumpkin Fest in Ludwigsburg with another friend.  Legoland was a major highlight for us all at the beginning of October.  The sculptures made out of legos were amazing and we all had a fun time in spite of the chilly weather.  And then Tom was busy with a day long retreat for the Chapel Middle School youth group - Equip.  We had a small celebration for Tom's birthday, with his favorite meal for dinner...Spaghetti Carbonara and for his cake I made a homemade tiramisu.  Not too bad for a first try (and with a box mixes help).


Then there was the Pumpkin Drop.  Gregory's school does an annual Pumpkin Drop around the 31st of October.  Each class decorates a VERY large box and fills it with specific varieties of objects.  Gregory's class was marshmallows and popcorn.  Each elementary class is paired with a couple of high school students to do this project.  And then near the end of a school day a ladder fire truck is brought in and 5 grocery carts full of pumpkins are brought in too.  Joshua and I got to watch much of this event with the school.  It was fun to see the decorated boxes (oh and they are assigned a state to help with the themes of the decorations on the box).  Gregory's class was Delaware.  The goal is to have the pumpkin drop into the box and for it not to break apart after it lands in the box.  I think there was only one pumpkin that succeeded and it wasn't Gregory's class, but Gregory still had a ton of fun with this.  Joshua continues even now to almost daily talk about the Pumpkin Drop and how it goes "boom". 


There were a few other smaller activities of bowling with friends and our first decent snow fall (about 5 inches or so).  And then there was Thanksgiving, but that will have a post of it's own.  As always, there's more pics at our shutterfly website.  http://tomandroxannecook.shutterfly.com/action/

Soccer Season

At the beginning of this month we finished out our first go around with sports.  Gregory played on a 4 & 5 year old team, the Purple Monsters.  He had fun, but also learned what he doesn't like about soccer.  He enjoyed the practice, but didn't like the games.  He says he didn't like that he couldn't use his hands and could only use his feet and legs.  So this spring he wants to try baseball or t-ball.  We are thinking this might be a better fit for him since it's not as physical or as aggressive as soccer can be (even for 4 and 5 year olds).  It was fun being a "soccer mom" for a season, we'll see if Joshua wants to try it in a year or so...I might get another chance.