Happy Pumpkins!

Personally, I'm just not real crazy about Halloween, but when you have little kids you can't exactly ignore it all together. I was happy to discover The Pumpkin Patch Parable several years ago, when my children were quite small. It has become a "Halloween" tradition at our house.

It is the sweetly-illustrated story of a farmer who raises pumpkins. When harvest time comes he chooses just the right one to transform into a smiling jack'o'lantern. He pulls all the "ickiness" from the pumpkin's "heart" and then puts a light inside that shines out from the pumpkin's face. There are scriptures on each page that turn this simple story into an object lesson of the change Jesus makes when we allow him to take the sin out of our hearts and put His light within us.

So this week when my now-teen-age children were begging to carve a pumpkin, I got a nice big one for them to work on.
They carved a traditional happy face into it, and carefully washed the seeds for us to roast.
And yes, I dug out the book from their preschool years and read it to them again!

They didn't mind.

More happy pumpkins: Check out my friend Greg's blog to see the awesome pumpkins he and his family carved. And then pop over to We are THAT Family for a whole list of blogs who are posting their pumpkin pictures!

A Business Trip

The dog beat me to the front door at 5:30 yesterday morning when we heard the familiar diesel engine of our Dodge Ram pull into the driveway. Lyle had been gone since Friday, so we were eager to welcome him home. He came in, unpacked, took a shower, grabbed a cup of coffee and went to work. Nothing terribly unusual about that, except that he and his brother had been driving all night and all the previous day!

The print shop where Lyle works had bought a printing press on eBay. It was in Minneapolis. So he and his brother (owner of the shop) made arrangements to go pick it up the same weekend as the big printing trade show in Chicago. That would just work out great, of course! They could leave here at noon on Friday and by driving all night Friday night, and all night Monday night, attend the print show, pick up the printing press, and be back to work on Tuesday morning.

3,600+ miles in less than 4 days!

Middle-aged men, mind you! I think they are both crazy!

Here's the load they went after:
And here's how they got it off the truck:I hope the press works out well for them. I am grateful they made the trip safely!

Tea and Cookies for Fall

When the weather turns cool and crisp, nothing says "cozy" to me like a hot beverage! I have decided that hot beverages are my "comfort food." I like coffee, tea, cocoa, apple cider... and I like cute mugs! I splurged the other day and got a set of 4 pumpkin mugs just to celebrate the season.
Later, I found Pumpkin Spice tea in 2 different brands (at 2 different stores). Of course I had to try them both! Spice teas are my favorite... and since they "go" with my new mugs... well, what else could I do?

Another "fall tradition" that has evolved at our house is the Apple Glazed Cookies that my daughter makes each year, when apple season comes around.
She discovered the recipe in an Amish cookbook several years ago. This year she added "fall" sprinkles. I thought that was a fun touch!

I posted her recipe on The Persnickety Pantry, if you'd like to try it. Visit Looking Towards Heaven for more seasonal tricks and treats.

NaNoWriMo

All my life I've dreamed of writing a novel. Not because I have this burning story that just begs to be told. I don't. But mainly because I have read so many mediocre novels that someone somewhere thought worthy of publishing, and I think, "I could write a better story than that."

That, plus my mother fully believes that someday I will write a book.

So last year, when a friend of mine introduced me to NaNoWriMo, I decided to participate. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. It is not expected that you will publish the novel. In fact, the whole idea seems to be quantity of words, not quality. It is basically for the exercise of writing.

And so, fudging on the guidelines just a bit, last year I wrote a 35,000 word memoir. November was over before I got to 50,000, but I was satisfied with my project.

Tonight was the kick-off party for NaNoWriMo 2008 in my area, and since Lyle is out-of-town, the girls and I decided to go. It was at a local pizza place, and we knew absolutely no one. There were 12 or 15 people there. The cool thing is that the first person who introduced herself was another homeschool mom, there with her daughter! We shared a table and had an enjoyable visit.

Our "municipal liaison" had wonderful little goody bags and workbooks for us. I think of it as a "novel kit"... just add words! There is a cute little pom-pom plot bunny, a writer's block rock (with an instructions card), a tiny vial of glittery "Emergency Plot Hole Filler", and an official NaNoWriMo badge sticker... oh, yeah, and chocolate!
So now the question remains, what am I going to write about?

Here's what I have so far:

• The protagonist (that's the main character) shall be female.
• The protagonist shall be a dynamic character. (That means she shall learn something or change some way over the course of the story.)

And that's all I got!

Guess I better start filling in some of the blanks in that handy-dandy notebook and see where it takes me!

I expect I'm really just crazy to even think about doing this. I don't have time to write a novel!

Junior Elf Books

I love vintage books! Big surprise, huh?

And because I always need more books, I couldn't pass up this handful of "Junior Elf" books when I came across them at a garage sale this summer. You'll probably have to click on the picture to enlarge it to see that the cover price on most of them is 15 cents! (One is 19 cents. What's that about? They thought 20 cents would be too much, but 15 cents wasn't quite enough?)
I can't use the excuse that I got them for my children, because my children are too old for them... so I'll just admit that I got them for me! They remind me of a story from my childhood that my mother tells.

I must have been about 3 or 4 when Mother picked up a few of these little books, thinking that they would just be so handy to keep in the diaper bag for my sisters and me to look at in church, to keep us quiet, you know. My sisters are twins and they are 19 months younger than I am. Plus we had a baby brother or two. (Well, yes, we do have 2 younger brothers... I'm just not sure exactly when this incident took place. It may have been before the youngest was born.)

In any case, Mother's hands were more than full. Unfortunately, she quickly discovered that an assortment of cute little picture books was not the thing to keep us quiet in church. She said she gave us each a little book to look at it, and we each flipped through it lickety-split and then wanted to trade with a sister for another book. We ended up making more noise passing books back and forth than we did with no books.

So that was the end of our getting to look at books in church. *sigh*

I remember getting to draw pictures sometimes, and playing with a handkerchief. (I can still roll a hanky up into twin babies swinging in a hammock! Anybody else remember doing that?)

But we were the preacher's kids, so mainly I think we just learned to sit still and listen. Eventually.