Fall Traditions

If you have followed this blog for a while, you know that Fall is a favorite time of year for us. October is certainly the kick off to a busy few months as we gear up for the holiday season and countdown to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (wow, Christmas already??).

I love to watch Mia grow into our traditions. The first weekend in October is always a big weekend for us. The Fall/Halloween decorations come out, we celebrate Gabe's birthday, pick pumpkins, and break out Ichabod Crane and It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown movies. Even though Mia came down with an ear infection on Friday, we were still able to take part in our traditions.

Saturday, we celebrated Gabe's birthday. His mom, Bonnie (aka Grandma B. or "Ma B") came to join us in the fun. To make it extra special, I cooked one of his favorite German meals. Sauerbraten, spatzle, and red cabbage with apples. Yum!!!

(picture from KitchenProject.com)

It sounds fancy but let me just confess that the Sauerbraten was cooked in a crock pot and everything else was pre-made and shipped to me from a great little German food company in Denver. Nevertheless, it turned out superb. I highly recommend this meal.

I did, however, bust out the Martha Stewart vibes and baked him an awesome cake. Which I will share with you in the next post.

After dinner, we spent a rare night out with friends and had a great time. As usual, I forgot my camera so I have no pictures to share. I really must get better about that.

Sunday, we continued our annual Fall tradition and took Mia to the Johnson Farms pumpkin patch. Oh boy, what fun we had! Mia loved, loved, loved it.

Here we are last year:
This year, Mia is walking, talking and able to really take it all in.


We saw baby chickens...
She kept going back to see these little babies about 5 times. It was hard to pull her away.

Then she discovered she could chase the bigger babies around.

You can barely see the little chicken, but she chased and chased him all over.

She loved looking at all the animals there. So much more exciting than seeing them in a book.


Gotta get back to the chickies!
She had no fear or hesitation this time.

Then there was the hay loft where she drug her Daddy back and forth across the hay for quite a while.
She was having a blast.


Finally, it was time to get on the hay ride up to the pumpkin patch. But by this time, she was losing steam.

We didn't spend much time in the patch, but she was able to pick out a couple of pumpkins. Which ever one she pointed at and said "pretty" or "cool", we took.

By Sunday evening, we were all exhausted, but it was a fantastic weekend with fun had by all!