Halloween Pumpkin Painting

My wife has had a few of the Fall and Halloween decorations out for a few weeks now, and we've had a few bouts of Fall-like weather during that time. The trees are nearing peak with numerous yellow and a few orange leaves mixing in with the browning colors of other plants. We've made our visit to the pumpkin patch, and now we've finished our pumpkin painting.

My wife has her 'Queen Bee' pumpkin, and the boys and I decided on a variety of super heroes for ours. The boys, even at ages 7, 5, and 3, likely did as good of a job as I did.

And now they're prominently displayed on the front porch.

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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...

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Anniversary Weekend...

Todays marks 7 years of marriage for Alyssa and I, and 12 years of 'officially' being together after I asked her to be my girl at 12:15am on October 3, 2004. We've ventured off to Kansas City for my first career job, lived in an apartment, bought our first home, had 3 children, bought a dog, and moved to our second home together earlier this year after I made a career move in mid-2015. The only questionable decision we've made was the dog, okay she's only questionable 5-10% of the time.

So what do you do for your anniversary weekend? You head to town with all three boys in tow, stop at a store or two, go out to eat at Steak N Shake, and then head to your first hockey game! At least that is what we did this past weekend, alongside a few tasks at home and another venture to the creeks down the road and the pond out back.

The hockey game was a junior level team (18-22 year olds) named the Topeka Roadrunners, as they took on the Amarillo Bulls in a North American Hockey League matchup. The boys enjoyed watching something new, and the middle one wouldn't take his eyes off the ice always looking for certain players and clapping when necessary after the Roadrunners scored. The oldest even came away with a game used puck. We will definitely head back to another game before their season is over!

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