Autumn at Eastside Park

Yesterday was golden: golden sunshine, golden leaves, golden MOMENT with my kids at our favorite park. It was absolutely dreamy with all of that gold everywhere. Eastside park is my favorite block in Grandview, hands down.

From my journal entry on November 1st, 2016:

It's November, and the sun came out for the first time in over a week! Jay and Rose had a dentist appointment at 3pm today, so I checked them out of school at 1:30pm and we went to Eastside Park to play in the leaves. We have been leaf-ing it up at that park since Jay was 1 year old, and I look forward to it every year. I love gorgeous fall leaves, and that park has giant maples that pile the ground in bright yellow leaves. When the sun comes out, the place GLOWS. I adore it.

I realized that we will be gone on our traditional leisurely leaf-playing weekend this year. And the afternoons this week are swamped! Halloween yesterday, dentist appointments AND parent teacher conferences for the kids today, and young women in excellence plus prepping for our long weekend tomorrow. And the City of Grandview likes to vacuum up all its leaves during the second week of November. Our leaf time was limited! When could we get our yearly leaf-romp in? The answer came to me in a ray of golden sunshine: check the kids out of school early today to PLAY before their dental appointment.

[trying to get Amber to look into the sun for the picture: not successful] 

[bright sun!]

We couldn't have asked for better weather. After well over a week of 90% clouds, rain, cold, and/or wind, it mellowed out into a beautiful 64 degrees and sunny. We frolicked in the leaves and scooped them up into a pile with sticks. A lady across the street from the park was raking leaves in her own yard and walked over to loan us her rake. It was so nice of her! We got a nice big pile and returned the rake. Then she and her husband dragged a giant tarp of their leaves across the street and dumped them onto the kids, tripling the size of our leaf pile in the process! It was awesome, and brought back so many childhood memories.

After a little while in the leaves, we ventured further abroad. Amber wanted to roam the park, and Jay was concerned about her so he followed, and Rose soon trotted after them, with me trailing in their wake. We visited the merry-go-round, two slides, and the best swings in town, the ones with SUPER long 20 foot chains that let you go flying high into the sky with some good strong pumping. I even took a turn (in spite of my tendency to motion sickness) and it was a RUSH sailing into the trees that high! Jay does not like heights, so he got down and took pictures of us girls swinging.

 I love that dappled light.

After a while we went back to our leaf pile and Jay and Rose had a leaf-war. Amber, ever-exploring, lost a boot and removed her bow in her amble-ings, and slid down a nasty slide that had been egged on Halloween last night. She returned to me damp and dirty. Dentist time! {end journal entry}

 One of my favorite pictures of all time.

 Boys and sticks. 

I love this next series of pictures, with Jay sneaking up on Rose:

I am so thankful for this little pocket of autumnal heaven in the middle of the bare, dry land of the Yakima Valley.

Halloween 2016

Halloween. I am too tired to dig in and really write about it, so a photo-with captions post it is. We made witch finger cookies, went to piano lessons, dressed up in costumes, went trunk-or-treating, went trick-or-treating, and handed out hundreds of candies, all before 8:00pm on Halloween. Did I mention that we took a few pictures amidst the chaos? To avoid the impossibility of getting costume pictures in the dark on Halloween night, I had the kids dress up on Sunday afternoon so we could get a few pictures. A photo shoot after church during Amber's naptime was challenging, but we persevered. 

This year we had: Amberry, Rosemione, and JARRRRgyle (a strawberry, Hermione, and a pirate). Amber wore the same costume as last year, so it was rather tight. It kept me laughing! I made Jay a pirate beard out of black fleece. By the end of Halloween night, he had eaten a lollipop with it on and there was black fuzz stuck to his cheeks where the beard overlapped the sticky residue! More laughter. And Rose, who said "people might think that I'm Luna Lovegood instead of Hermione because of my hair." But she definitely channeled Hermione's wandwork and steely courageous glare. It wasn't until after the photo shoot when I was looking at the pictures that I realized that Rose was copying Emma Watson's pose on the cover of our Harry Potter DVD collection!

 That stuffed berry booty! 

Halloween morning: the night before, I realized that we hadn't made our traditional witch finger cookies yet, so I threw together the dough and refrigerated it over night. Somehow the kids got ready for school fast enough the next morning for us to shape the finger cookies! They came out of the oven one minute before we had to leave for school.

Halloween night: first stop, our ward trunk or treat.

 In the trunk

CrAmber--it was no small feat to buckle her carseat around that stuffed strawberry butt costume! I was cracking up watching the process. 

After the trunk-or-treat, we drove back to Grandview and visited a few houses in our neighborhood: the Gibbons (cousins' house!) and the Whites (grandparents' house!), plus a handful of others nearby. Then the kids retired to loot their spoils and hand out candy at our house. This year I let Jay and Rose each save 7 pieces of candy, since 7 is a powerful magical number according to Harry Potter.

As usual, our neighborhood was crawling with trick-or-treaters. 

Amberry getting a piece of candy from Grama Leslie. Grampa Dan was hiding under that ghost-skeleton next to her, scaring people. Amber did NOT like the way he was moving the skeleton from under the sheet, and she almost didn't go over to Grama at all. 

After he emerged from his ghost-sheet, Grampa Dan took our family costume photo. Jeff dressed as a wizard trying to dress as a Muggle. He's meta like that.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to dress up this year, but I ended up snagging a last minute $2 witch hat at Goodwill (at lunchtime on Halloween) and threw together an outfit from the black clothing in my closet. I made this awesome sparkly black skirt for a dance back in college, and haven't worn it since then until this Halloween! My skin does not agree with face paint (and we didn't have any either) so I wrapped a green scarf around my neck as an appropriate allusion to green skin. My hat was broad, tall, amazing, and pointy, and it made me at least seven feet tall, from hat-tip to toes. Oddly enough, I felt quite regal in my sparkly skirt and witch hat, even with the Underarmour coldgear I had on top and bottom underneath it! Costumes are fun. I'm glad I overcame my inner Halloween Scrooge and concocted a costume this year after all.

Giving candy out at home--Amber loved it, surprisingly. After the kids chose their 7 candies to save, they dumped the rest of their candy into our bowl. When it was ten minutes till 8pm, we started handing out handfuls of the candy to get rid of it. At 8:00, we put the last couple of handfuls into a bucket, left it on the front porch, and put the kids to bed. 

Bye-bye, Halloween!