sunny oklahoma

October 2012 has been a wild and wonderful one.  I have zig-zagged around the country to hit five states (7 if you count layovers).  Every weekend has been an out-of-town adventure.  And every time we get home, the leaves have turned a little more and I think about how good life is and how blessed we are to be here and there.  

So last weekend was a family trip to Oklahoma.  My grandparents came up to see my parents and we flew down to introduce them to Bo, their first great-grandchild.  As my grandma says, there is something special about the first in a new generation.  I have to agree, as I was their first grandchild.  :) They really liked him, which made me happy.  He was on point almost the entire trip.  In some ways he was easier to fly with, because he's more distractible than he was at 13/14 months.  He will play with trucks or read books or watch the iPad.  In other ways it was harder, because he's big and willful and, well, a toddler.  

We picked my brother up during our layover in Houston and my parents had kept his visit a secret, so they surprised my grandparents when he walked in the house.  However, the joke was on them, because Elyse flew in from Pennsylvania and gave the whole family a shock on Friday night!  Surprise visits are the best.  

There are more pictures coming but this is a good intro . . . some of us went to the pumpkin patch and had a great time.  Bo is enamored with tractors and animals and pumpkins and everyone else is enamored with Bo, so it went well. 

friend weekend

For the first weekend in October, several of my college girls met in Chicago for a '10-year-friend-reunion,' marking 10 years since we started college and met in the isolated cornfields of Indiana.  While it seemed really normal at the time, our school might as well have been on a deserted island for all the entertainment the surrounding towns offered.  But that was apparently the perfect atmosphere for good times and forever friendships!  

During our senior year, a group of us moved into a house off-campus together.  However quaint we thought it was, it has since been condemned and torn down.  The memories live on . . . 

This is the oldest pic I could find of us, from senior year. 

You can bet if Groupon existed, we would've had that on a giant canvas in our living room.

Alas, in 2005, when that picture was taken, Groupon had not been born.
Facebook was in its infancy and only for college students.  I remember some of us signing up that year.
Still not everyone had a cell phone.  Remember phone cards?
Phones were not smart, and I don't think I texted at all then.
Email had just been invented.
NO, just kidding, we're not that old!
Instant Messanger was in full swing during our early college years and we had fun remembering each others' screen names.

We had a lot of run reminiscing.  Hilarious professors, classmates, and phrases we used to say all the time were resurrected for the weekend.  I am really glad I have these girls - not just because of the growing we did together or how they just 'get me,' but because they help me remember!  

We spent so much time talking, I forgot to take many pictures.  If I had, they would've been of us curled up on couches.  I do like this one:

Welcoming back our little African princess from three years in Kenya!

And here's a shot of the whole group:

Thank you, friends, for flying and driving across America!  It was so special to be together! 

tough mudder

Last Saturday, Matt and his friends from home ran a Tough Mudder.  I did not run because I am neither tough nor strong.  I took pictures.  

This thing is 11 miles long with 22 obstacles scattered throughout the course.  Their course in Poplar Bluff, MO, was built on a four wheeling site, so they conquered hills and streams along with the man-made obstacles that forced them to swim, crawl, jump over things, and occasionally be electrocuted.  (I may not be tough but I am also no fool.  No thank you.)

Pre-Run, clean and numbered, in front of the very last obstacle.  Some of those long yellow wires are charged.  

The 6,000+ runners were split into many starting heats.  The guys started in the second heat of the day, which was great because they didn't have to get psyched out watching people go through the obstacles (that was my reasoning).  And also the line to the showers got longer later in the afternoon (again, my reasons, not theirs. They're tough, remember.)  Before the race even started they had to hop a wall to get into the holding pen.

And they're off!

And I was off trying to follow my map and catching them at as many obstacles as possible.  

This picture does not do justice to what they all agreed was the worst part of the whole thing: jumping into a dumpster filled with ice water, diving under a barrier, and crawling out the other side.

Ahh, a Saturday afternoon crawling under barbed wire.  My favorite past-time.

I liked that this wasn't really a 'race'- nothing was timed and it was structured to foster teamwork, not just amongst people who signed up together but amongst everyone in the race.  It was nice to see.  It also meant they could stop for a group photo right in the middle of the whole thing.

Log jumping . . .

Wall climbing . . .

Fingertip-dangling . . .

And of course, electrocution.

And lots of mud.  

And many happy faces at the finish line.

oldies

These pics are really old - sometime in August or September - but I found them on my camera when I pulled the pics off from the pumpkin patch.  And they made me smile, so I thought I'd share them.  I got the bright idea that Bo would like to finger paint and whipped up some food safe paint from a recipe on Pinterest (I can't remember which one but I think I searched toddler finger paint).  

The consensus was that it's fun but also really messy... as in it's been 2 months since I've attempted it again.  Also Bo was not loving the messy hands.  I bought some foam brushes so if we do it again, he doesn't have to get "yucky" hands as he calls it.  And while the website said it was washable, it was dried really crusty and hints of our fun day are still on the chairs outside.  BUT nontoxic is good (I think it was just flour and water and maybe cornstarch + food coloring) because when I put the bowl of blue on the ground, Moose started licking it up . . . pretty gross mouth full of blue on our dog.  

pumpkin season

I will join the ten thousand people out there who are crowing about pumpkin spice lattes and boot weather - I do love Autumn!  I like how my friend Kelly put it - that Fall is to the Southerner what Spring is to the New Englander . . . a change from a relentlessly long season of hot or cold.  So while I will miss the enormous, fiery trees that crowd out the road in Long Island and drop their leaves into swirling piles below, I think I will enjoy these hillsides around us just as much as they change colors.  It all beats growing up in a desert where the months were "hot" and "hotter" and the teachers were left trying to explain seasons with colorful illustrations of a tree in four phases of leaf-growing and losing.  

So, we kicked off the official start of Fall this weekend with a visit to Gentry Farm down the road from our house.  It was opening weekend and there were tons of pumpkins to choose from - perhaps the first time I've picked a pumpkin from its vine?  Fun, is what it is.  

Bo and his sweet cousins.

Never mind how Bo's white head disappears into the sky . . .

The boys had a blast chasing chickens, going down slides, and playing in long troughs of corn and wheat.  Of course the whole things makes me want to have a farm . . . and then I feel like being responsible for large animals might be a bit much for me.  But a quick search on 'how to raise chickens' seemed kind of encouraging.   A cheaper solution to those free-range eggs I keep buying.  And I also found plans for this chicken coop: 

(source)

Umm, a coop with a window box and operable shutters?  Sign me up. 

How we got from pumpkins to raising chickens is not important.  Happy Fall!