Football, Telescopes, and Pumpkins!

It didn't seem like it was that busy of a weekend, but looking back I guess we did quite a bit during a regular ol' weekend. We started off attending another high school football game, and saw our Royal Valley pull off their second win of the season. Of importance the team is 2-0 when we are in attendance, and 0-4 when we are not. Brayden and his first grade classmates got the privilege of singing the national anthem before the game.

Saturday morning the boys and I headed into the back acre and cut down around 40 Cedar trees ranging from 1 to 5 years old. Sadly this cleared less than 1000 square feet, so there's a few hundred trees left to go. Saturday evening I took the two oldest boys up to the Banner Creek Observatory as they were having an open house to observe the moon. There were several amateur astronomers who brought their personal equipment to view the moon, and the boys loved looking through all of them. The big show was viewing the moon through the observatories 20 inch RCOS telescope shown below (image from their website). For a general perspective this scope has a magnification range of 63 to 627 times, and has a cool price tag in the range of $40,000 to $55,000. The boys were impressed by seeing all of the craters and details of the moon!

And finally we ventured off on Sunday to the Schaake Pumpkin Patch to grab some pumpkins and enjoy other activities. They have a playground, a small hay bale maze, and a few animals, alongside 30 acres of pumpkins with free tractor rides to/from. They may not have numerous activities, but they are priced right, FREE! A few collages of that fun are below...