Fall Finally

The weather was rainy this weekend, which made it feel like fall. So we did our best to have some fall fun. First, we celebrated Taylor’s birthday with a steak dinner.  Unfortunately, since he’s the best steak-griller in the family, he had to cook his own birthday dinner. It was delicious.

Andrew and I got crafty. I have little to no DIY skills, and any attempts to be crafty usually means I end up with either a half-finished project or an under-whelming result. But that doesn’t stop me from trying, and I look for simple and easy projects. That means a project with only one or two steps. (Any more than that – see results mentioned above.) I saw some gold acorns in the latest Pottery Barn catalog, and thought, “I can do that!” Andrew, my enthusiastic partner in all crafty projects, attacked the job of gathering acorns. And we found some really great ones too. The small ones in our backyard were nice (they may be small, but they are an army of thousands!), but the ones at the zoo were really awesome. Huge acorns, the size of Noah’s head. Might be a slight exaggeration, but still big. Before the rain came, we squeezed in a nice trip to the zoo and loaded up on acorns. We also played on the playground and on the coin-tornado thingie. I hear rumors that there are animals at the zoo, somewhere…

Hopefully, they didn’t mind us leaving with a few acorns. We took them home and applied gold spray paint. Andrew is very proud of our gold acorns, which will add a nice touch to our fall décor (and by fall décor, I mean the sad pinecones I spray-painted last year… I’m sensing a decorating theme!)

 Noah grilled while we painted...

While acorns are fun, nothing says fall like pumpkins. Noah was napping, and in order to keep it that way, I got Andrew out of the house and we headed to the pumpkin patch. He had a blast picking out pumpkins. He’s a very indiscriminate picker. The first one he sees, that’s the one he wants. I tried to encourage him to take a look around, to really inspect the pumpkin for roundness, good color, and a nice stem. I don’t really know what makes for a good pumpkin, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want a bumpy one. Andrew couldn’t care less what the pumpkins looked like, he just wanted a lot. So he loaded up the wagon with six pumpkins. Good thing pumpkins are cheap. And totally worth it because he was so proud of his pumpkins. He kept asking me how many we had bought because he never could quite remember. Everyone we saw was told how many pumpkins he had. When he walked into school on Monday, his response to “Hello Andrew” was “I got six pumpkins.” Totally worth it.

We are only a few weeks away from the big day - STEP UP for Down Syndrome. If you haven't joined our team yet, please come walk with us. It will be a lot of fun! If you can't come, please consider making a donation. It's for a great cause.

http://www.ezeventsolutions.com/fr/dsamemphis/2012stepup/NitroNoahsLocomotive