Fall 2024

[Previous fall activities: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2012]

[Previous homemade halloween costumes: flags, siphonophore]

This year, Chase decided he wanted to be an orange cat for halloween so he cut out and ironed on the orange patches on a white jump suit. He had a ton of fun trick or treating with friends and going to all the Halloween school activities (his last year of elementary!). We also did some leaf peeping and I had some fancy glow in the dark stick-on nails that I felt like documenting. A highlight was celebration Thanksgiving with my aunt/uncle/cousin who have just moved to the US. Nate and I managed to cook a 20-lb turkey and make all the fixings for a wonderful meal together. Chase and his cousin uncle also had lots of time to play the week of Thanksgiving.  

All the halloween fun with trick-or-treating and school trunk-or-treat

Leaf peeping, the zoo, and my fun nails

Hosting a real Thanksgiving meal for the full family

Gardening Success

This year was our most successful year yet with gardening after a sort of failure 2 years ago and nothing last year. We started off the summer having planted watermelons, pumpkins, tomatoes, jalapeños, and eggplants. We ended up growing all of them, although the deer got too friendly and ate the pumpkins and watermelons. We harvested jalapeños, tomatoes, and eggplants clear until November! So fun and now we know how to improve for next year. 

Not only was it a good year for vegetables, it was a wonderful year for all sort of flowers, specifically our beautiful hydrangeas. 

Our deer friends were very interested in our garden as well and ended up eating all three of our huge pumpkins and our lone watermelon. We fixed the fence around September which kept them out for the remainder of the gardening season. 

Despite the deer, we were able to harvest lots of vegetables all summer and fall

Some more pictures of our harvests -- including finding out jalapeños turn red when they are ripening and are even spicier!

Chase didn't shy away from eating his home-grown vegetables. He said they were tastier (he rated the tomatoes 7/10) than in store (4/10).