How we love fall.....

I took the boys to Johnson's Farms the day before Halloween. We had never been there before and my friend, Pati, recommended it. It was a fantastic place. Mazes, playsets, petting zoo, corn maze, pumpkin patch, hay rides and the piece de resistance....a straw barn. The barn was filled with bales of hay and haystacks. Kids could climb to the top and jump down into the hay. Tons of fun for Grayson and Cooper! They loved it! As for the pumpkins, we need to go earlier in the season as they were picked over but it looked like a great place to find your perfect pumpkin. Cooper really wanted to run through the corn maze and got his wish. Grayson enjoyed seeing the animals--baby pigs, chicks, horses, donkeys. It was a beautiful fall day to be enjoyed with my pumpkin loving son and the one with a jack-o-lantern smile.

Who's counting?

Cooper will receive his 1st reconciliation this Saturday. His teacher, Ms. Rinke, had a funny story during parent-teacher conferences. She told me that she was reviewing the whole confession process--what are sins and how they should tell the priest. She told them not to worry about the number of times they committed a sin because there probably wasn't a way to know exactly how many times you committed that sin. Then she said...Cooper's hand went up in the air.

"I know that I have disobeyed my parents 145 times."

"Really? Can you tell me what each of those 145 times was?"

"No."

"Okay. Then you just need to tell Father Frank or Chris that you disobeyed your parents because if you tell them it was 145 times, they may ask you to list them all off and you would be in there a very long time."

I told Ms. Rinke I think Coop low-balled that number.