lexington, ky

The weekend before thanksgiving we met up with Laura and her family to finish Erin's introductions of my immediate family as well as to give the kids a chance to meet each other. We had a pretty fun time.

There was a cool apple orchard in Georgetown, KY that had a great play area for kids. Jack is standing on top of the hay maze thing. They surprisingly enough also had very good apples. The suncrisp we got were quite tasty and went into a quite tasty apple pie. Publix recently started stocking honeycrisp apples which aside from being twice the size of my fist are also pretty tasty. Probably not as good as the suncrisp we got in Kentucky though.

This is maybe at the orchard too. It's probably at the orchard. Let's just say it was at the orchard and be confidant and be done with it, ok?

Agnes was quite into being held. She didn't much care who was doing it as long as she didn't have to walk. It worked out fairly well toward the end since she wanted to sit in her stroller and Jackson wanted to push her stroller.

Fun times were had at the hotel pool.

We went to what we thought was going to be a tour of a chocolate factory but the tour was only for weekdays and thus didn't much care for us showing up on Saturday. The kids had fun playing with all the candy (and tasting some too) in the shop, however.

On the way home Erin and I were asked constantly where Agless (we really tried to get him to say it correctly, Laura. Sorry) was going and when we were going to go visit her in Ohio. About halfway home we mentioned to Jack that we had to go home because the cats needed to be fed or else they'd die. We didn't anticipate the next 10 minutes of frantic shouting: "Hurry, Danny! Drive faster!! The kitties are dying!!"

Boating on Barack Obama

I guess when you're 3 years old, some things get lost in translation.

We thought that it would be a good education experience and a nice memory for Jackson if he went with us to go vote today. So, we bundled him up and left the house early today to go stand in line at the church that was our designated polling location.

Pretty soon it became apparent that Jackson thought we were going on a boat and that the boat was called Barack Obama (or maybe Bob Barr). Disappointment ensued when he realized there was no boat in sight and that the excitement peaked when he got a piece of candy from a poll worker.

So, I think we'll be trying to locate a boat ride of some sort this weekend.

In other news, we went early this morning (~30 minutes before the polls opened) and there were already maybe 50 people standing in line. I passed another couple polling places on the way to work and they were pretty packed. I know Tennessee is pretty firmly in the McCain column but everyone I work with seems to be voting Obama.

Fall Hiking

This weekend was our first weekend with Jack in awhile—between my birthday and Jack being gone for most of two weekends, it's been awhile since we did any munchkin-related activities.

On Saturday, we went to Ruby Falls, which is arguably Jackson's favorite place on the planet. He loves loves loves to go there and see the waterfall. The guides have a script they use when they take the group through the cave, and tidbits from their spiel are starting to show up in Jackson's yammering. Most notably, "don't drink the water."

On Sunday, we got lost for awhile and then made our way to Pocket Wilderness. It's just a wooded area that has some hiking trails. We don't really know how long/far we walked, but it was long enough to exhaust Jack.


On our way back towards the car, he was pretty insistent on being carried.


It was really pretty—fall colors were in pretty full force on the trees. And there was a stream running parallel to the walking trail.

Halloween

This year, Jackson was Thomas the Train. He was pretty proud of it, and we tried to get him to say "Allllllll aboard! Trick or treat!" but he wasn't really buying into that. Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt Donna came to dinner and we all had a really nice evening.


Jackson had a great Halloween (I think). We....

- made a Halloween gingerbread house,

- carved a pumpkin and roasted pumpkin seeds

- baked and decorated cookies, and

- went trick-or-treating around the complex using the questionably effective elbow-door-knocking technique


He did great going door-to-door... In previous years I think he was a) too tired, and b) too shy to do much, but Jack was noticeably more into it this year.

Count of children who knocked on our door: 2 (including Jack)

He's also turned into quite the little candy fiend. He'd never really been into cookies and candy, but I think he ate his way to a stomachache on Friday night.