Fall Fun

We're in western Kentucky this week visiting family, and today was full of fall fun. This morning I awoke (a little too early--my internal clock is still set to Eastern Time) to see the sun creeping through the back yard.



The leaves are ready to change, and some of them are already turning beautiful shades of red and yellow.



We visited a farm today where we went on a hayride...



picked apples...



played in a sandbox full of corn...



explored a pumpkin patch...



and gathered walnuts.



Today's fun was a welcome change from yesterday's fast food and interstate driving!

Doing the hard work so you don't have to...

I just peeled the paper from a gazillion crayons to make molded crayons for the goody bags at my son's birthday party, and I thought I would give you a few tips on how to do it more efficiently! (I was pretty slow getting started, but once I figured out a few things it was smooth peeling!)

1. If you enjoy mundane and agonizingly slow tasks, then by all means scrape that paper with your fingernail (this also gives your fingernails a nice multi-colored hue--saves money on nail polish, I guess). I took an Exacto knife and cut a line lengthwise in the paper. For many of the colors, the paper will then come right off. (Unfortunately the tip of my finger also nearly came right off--be careful!)

2. For some reason there are colors that really like to keep their paper. In my experience, the more yellow in the color, the more modest the crayon. The deeper purples and blues also had disrobing issues. This led me to tip number...

3. Stick them in the freezer. After other failed attempts at skinning the stubborn ones, I cut the slit in the paper, popped the bag of unpeeled crayons in the freezer, and waited. Once they were nice and chilly, I took them out, and guess what? The paper practically fell off of them!

Happy peeling!

Oh, goody!

When it comes to birthday parties, my favorite part is making the treat bags for our guests. My little guy turned two today, and here's what I did for the goody bags for his party:

I like to go heavier on the non-candy items, so this year we used party bubbles, a punching balloon (I saw these at the store and had so many fun memories of birthday parties gone by--I just had to get them!), molded crayons, a Halloween package of Teddy Grahams or Ritz Bitz, and a Dum Dum sucker. (It is really nice to have his party so near Halloween--we're able to get some neat things in the perfect sized packages!)


Of everything I put in the bags, the molded crayons are my favorite. Through trial and error I learned some pretty nifty tricks for preparing the crayons a little more efficiently, and they looked so pretty sitting in their little stacks getting ready to be bagged...