Again with the Pumpkin Patch...

Saturday we made our annual pumpkin patch pilgrimage. As promised (threatened?), here are the photos...

Forecast? Sunny!

My friend's kids were so adorably got up for the patch, and I overheard one admiring bypasser ask if they were twins. Hee! In every picture we got of them, C is looking dreamy and S is looking fierce. Seriously, don't let the ponies fool you. This girl is fierce! But yeah, also, adorable.

New this year at the patch: hay maze! For the taller set, it wasn't too tough to see where to go. But for the little people, the hay was high enough to actually be labrynthine. Plus, it was really cool to see the hay loft. I love the way my friend is all Roma Downey in the photo. I am an angel, sent by God. Haymazing!

This was the before picture, before Jim reminded me that I didn't need to shoot from so far away. But in all the after pictures, where I got closer and framed it better, the girls had gotten over the novelty of seeing me with the camera, so this is the shot that made it in.

I would like to pretend like my awesomely pegged jeans were all about my retro fashion sense, but actually they were about my stumpy legs and my being too lazy busy to get my new jeans altered to accommodate them. It was pretty muddy out there, I'm just saying.

There were so many good shots of Muriel. She is rocking her shag hairdo so effectively that we were thinking about scrapping the penguin costume and seeing if we could find her a teeny leisure suit. She also had a really cute word for pumpkin, something like "pupikaaaaannn."



Ah, these cuties. Are pumpkin patch trips really just photo ops? Hmmm. They are rife with photo ops, but we really enjoyed ourselves. And we got a really lovely pumpkin for our efforts.

In the spirit of pre-Halloween, I would like to also relate Naomi's weird new fascination, a conversation we call, "Tell me what has bited you before." Here's my list:
- ant
- flea
- spider
- tick
- bee (not technically a bite, but as you see we are liberal with our definition of that)
- mosquito
- cat
- dog
- hamster
- hermit crab (this was actually just a pinch, of course)
- jellyfish (again, not really a bite, but you know)
- Naomi

A little something in between

The end of year slate of blog posts stretches ahead...pumpkin patch, Halloween pictures, Thanksgiving, something in the beginning of December (please, not another wind storm/power outage combo!), then Christmas trip report and photos. This blog will be writing itself. So in the meantime, I will attempt to update the general status of things in our house. It is this. We are all sick and tired and overworked. Even Muriel is overworked. Ok, not really.

So, I don't know, bulleted list, maybe?

• Naomi and I have been going back and forth on Halloween costumes. I assumed, because she endlessly impersonates a cat, that she might want to be a cat for Halloween. Wrong! She wants to be something scary. I have been attacked by more than one cat, but why argue the point? She voted for ghost, witch, or monster. Witch it is. We made her a fancy skirt over the weekend, mail ordered a hat (ok, electronically mail ordered), and are scouring around for appropriately witchy striped tights.
  
• Related: We went out to dinner the other night with our friends, including Naomi's friend C. Naomi was quiet for a minute, then asked C., "What will you be for the Halloween?" This doesn't sound like a big deal, maybe, but it is. Because putting all these parts together, knowing Halloween is coming, we're all preparing for it, it's interesting what someone else will be, we make friendly chat at dinner, this is something that has not happened in such a neatly qualifiable way before. Synapses! Zap!
• Muriel had her fifteen month appointment, and is Still Not Heavy Enough to turn around in her carseat. Gaaaah. On the other hand, she did beat an ear infection all on her own when her hippie mother said no thanks to antibiotics. Small but mighty, baby.
  
• Oh, and Muriel is trying out new words. She has always had a little bit of parakeet in her, repeating sounds that sound like what you're saying, but really aren't. But lately she is making the connections between words and things, and can suddenly tell us what a range of animals say (specifically, cats, dogs, birds, cows, and elephants). She is also finally breaking out some Mamas, about damn time. Just kidding sweetie! Seriously, though, she's been Dada-ing it up for six months now.
• I am still taking a beating at work, but I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Just before that light, though, is a trip to California (going back to Cali!), which results in me missing...Halloween. Are you kidding me, people? Oh well. I'll bring back some vitamin D.
  
• Jim is the sickest of all, as his lot seems to be, but is still working from home like a dog. Sick as a dog? Yes. Working like a dog? Yes. Though Luna is an actual dog, and she is neither sick nor working, unless stalking table scraps and licking the rug under the table count as work. Which I guess they might.
• Oh- one more Naomi one. We had our parent teacher conferences at her preschool, and she is doing just great. Of course she could improve on letter sound recognition and cutting with scissors and fifty other things, but you know, she is three. The best news of all is that she never pitches fits at school as she sometimes does at home. Whew! That was my hopeful takeaway, and I got what I wanted.

That's all the news that's fit to post on this sad, neglected blog. We miss you, friends.

Five Years Only

I told someone recently that my five-year anniversary was coming up, and he said something like, "Only forty-five to go!" I am not sure what that meant. We should be able to make it seventy-five years or more, right?

Last year I posted a wedding photo, so this year I thought it would be fun to relive the other wedding, the Malaysia wedding, even though that one was a few months later. Jim's parents put it on for us at a hotel in KL. The place has a menu of wedding packages, and his parents picked a winner. It came with fabulously cheesy decorations, including our names in glittery styrofoam letters on the wall, a colossal tiered artificial cake, styrofoam swans, and a champagne tower (which we totally flooded and spilled).


I was keen on getting a cheongsam, which kind of broke my MIL's heart a little- she had pictured me in a fantastic Western gown, and we shopped through the wedding district of KL before I found what I wanted at a department store. Of course I had to buy an extra large one, because I am a towering giantess over there. When I asked her if the shoes I brought were OK, she said yes, as long as I painted my toenails. Heh.

There was some kind of fundraiser going on at his parents' church, where the Ladies' guild was selling kits for this traditional Chinese New Year dish where everyone mixes all the stuff together in a dish in the middle of the table with their chopsticks, and tries to hold up as much of it as they can as high as they can, all together. For longetivy! All the New Year traditions are for longevity or prosperity. Sounds like the Vulcans a little bit. So they arranged with the hotel to substitute the first dish of the wedding banquet with this dish, thereby raising extra funds for this school that the church supports. I throw that in because it shows what good people my in-laws are, but also because it added a weird tenor to the evening, since it continued to be a fundraising event, in addition to a wedding party.

We had a receiving line coming in, and a receiving line going out, so we shook the hand of every single guest twice. We also went around and drank a toast with each of the THIRTY tables, at the end of which, we were all (but especially my 90 pound mother-in-law who doesn't drink) a bit in our cups.

Then, the karaoke started. There were the church friends, goading each other to sing... "Friends, I have it from the mouth of Peter S. that he will donate five thousand ringit to the school if Eleanor and Michael come up on stage to sing a duet." (gasping, clapping, shouting) Duet. Mostly, though, it was the old drunk guys. The list was pretty limited, in their defense, but you would think they might have not needed to sing "Please Release Me" and "Your Cheating Heart" more than twice.

Eventually, Jim was pressured into singing something- he chose "Love Me Tender." Aw, he has a really good singing voice, which made standing up on stage next to the styrofoam swans in my slightly uncomfortable dress and my booze flush a little more romantic, I guess.

Weddings in Malaysia work kind of like mafia weddings in the movies- people just hand over money. So at the end of the night, Jim's dad counted up the take, and after buying dinner and drinks for three hundred people (and the dubious karaoke service), they still came out something like two hundred dollars up. It was really something.

In the same folder on the photo drive are our the pictures of our side trip to Langkawi, a Malaysian island that is just below the Thai border. So I'm throwing a few of those on here as well. We stayed at a beautiful resort that catered, oddly, to Italian tourists, so all of the buffets had Italian food choices on them.
We found some other places to eat, though.


Mah Jong tournaments on the veranda got pretty cutthroat.


What can you say, besides "Laksa Power"...?

Coconuts! Where are the kids in all these pictures? Oh yeah...

Happy anniversary, Jim. We're not always having this kind of fun, but it's never far away.