pumpakins and apples

Autumn is great for many reasons. These reasons include pumpakins and apples covered in caramel. Well, only the apples are covered in caramel, I guess. The pumpakins are carved out and lit from the inside. You could probably cover pumpkins in caramel and carve out an apple and light it too (...hmmm...maybe next year I'll try it) but that's not the standard.

Here are some people we know and like with their pumpakins.
(I should say we like them regardless of whether or not they have their pumpkins.)

Notice the concentration involved in the preliminary process. Good pumpkins result when these steps are carefully taken.

An excellent sketch (she's an artist). Will it translate well onto the pumpkin?
Stay tuned to find out.

Here's Nick working hard on our pumpakin. He did the whole thing by himself this year. Feel free to let him know what a nice job he did.

Some pumpkins come in a more different shape. Here are the boys with a sweet little ladies' night pumpkin. Her footies were even labeled "little pumpkin." Brookston was trying to make his way over to put on the moves. You can see him swinging his arm about wildly to get her attention. It didn't work.

Caramel has to be melted to stick to the apple of course and we made sure ours was nice and stirrable. Here's one of our stirrers extraordinaire.

And here are the wonderful apples themselves. I decided to dip mine pre-sliced and was extremely happy with the results. I'll dip my apples like this for years to come. I had a big apple to start with anyway, and I'm not talking about New York. I have a nice friend in New York though, he's very fashionable.

We party hard here with our pumpakins and apples and our little tykes just can't keep up, bless them. Here they are taking a little nipper napper in the next room.

Meanwhile, here I am enjoying my delicious apple:



And here's the pumpakin line-up. Does the pumpkin on the far left look familiar? Yeah, that's because they did pre-lims. And all that concentration paid off on that butterfly. Our pumpakin is the twinners smiling and the excellently topped pumpakin is just excellently topped, I must say. It gets a gold star.


Nick addition: I added 2 new songs to the bottom of our playlist. I find the Japanese and Swedish voices interesting.

Nick and I went to the new IKEA in Charlotte for the third time since it opened in February a weekend or two ago. We went to get a little wood activity gym for the boys since i have a fancy for wood toys. That, and we'll take any excuse to go to IKEA.


We arrived and loaded up the boys bjorn style. You could tell they were excited. They had been here in the womb and were dying to see what the place actually looked like on the outside.

I don't know if you can tell in the picture, but Everett is drooling in anticipation. Oh, and does the shirt look familiar? Mr. Atomic anyone? Will the streak continue? Stay tuned...

Like all good tourists we asked someone to take our picture, so here we are on our way in:

She was a nice lady. I'm sure her name was Nancy or Harriet or something nice like that.

It was lunch time so we headed straight for the cafeteria. To our delight, surprise and wonderment we had chosen a day when meatballs were 99¢.

We ate meatballs.

After lunch we headed to the floor. You can tell how much the boys were enjoying themselves in these pictures taken in the toy department. I mean, look at the sheer thrill on their faces.

Nick is blowing out the candles on the birthday hat.

Then we wandered around the show rooms.

Everett especially liked this library.

And Brookston liked these green chairs.

The boys decided they'd rather eat the usual than have meatballs, so they had their meal in the car. That was an adventure.

Brookston patiently waiting his turn:

Before we left we decided to eat meatballs again.
They were 99¢.

Since we saved so much money on the meatballs we decided it was financially sound to buy some chocolate cake. You can see Everett eyeing it. Don't worry, we kept an eye on him.

This time we ate I got gravy on Everett's head.

Brookston thought this was an excellent joke. Notice how Dad was prepared and had a napkin over B's head. If only I had taken such precautions...

And, you guessed it:

Mr. Atomic strikes again!
Just as we were about to head home, Everett fell victim.

Everett gets his clean up amidst all his IKEA booty.

Finally we were headed home. Everett and Brookston made a couple of friends @ IKEA so we brought them home with us.



And here we are at home enjoying the new play gym:

Yes, it was so exciting that Everett fell asleep. =)