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It can’t help our society that once you have kids, it becomes more and more impossible to fit exercise into your daily regimen – what with the requisite weekend morning activities that every good parent drags their kids to. Since Will has not been enjoying soccer, we skipped out Saturday, took the kids for a run, and then headed WAY over to Clayton to visit a pumpkin patch. (It was the Half Moon Bay pumpkin festival, but having been stuck in dead stopped traffic on both roads to HMB, I decided we’d head east this year.)

Clayton Farms has a great pumpkin patch, replete with a maze, swimming pools filled with beans, a train, and duck races. The kids enjoying themselves:

The swimming pools filled with beans were so cool, I’m going to have to accompany Doug to Costco until he has forgotten about them, lest he come home with a few giant bags of beans to make our own.

Peekaboo!

I’m always interested in ways to re-use products that we’d otherwise throw away, but the ideas are usually… how do you say… dumb? Basically, turning junk into more junk. Or art, and well, my house barely contains the people that live in it much less the tons of art we could produce with our waste. So, I was delighted to find this article with 16 awesome ways to re-use stuff.

If dragon doesn’t work out, we’ve got a back-up non-superhero plan:

We’ve been lucky that our kids are good eaters and fall for the 10 bite rule, but I still enjoyed this article on Slate about the extent some parents will go to get their kids to eat veggies.

I pick up our 3 year old neighbor and Will from school on Thursdays. We’ve been talking a lot about Halloween, trying to convince Will to branch out away from superheroes. My neighbor is going to be a Monkey. Will has now decided he is going to be a Dragon. The conversation went down like this:
Me: [Neighbor], what are you going to be for Halloween?
Neighbor: A monkey. What is Will going to be?
Will: A dragon. Dragons eat monkeys.
Neighbor: No they don’t.
Will: Yes they do.
Neighbor: Will, we’re just pretend animals. They are just costumes. I’m a pretend monkey.
Will: I’m a real dragon and dragons eat monkeys.
Neighbor: Well dragons can’t climb trees.
Will: But they can fly.
Neighbor: Well, then, dragons can fly up to empty trees!

Apparently Will loves me to the moon and to the grocery store and to school and to the fire station and to the park. “That’s a lot, huh, mom?”

I stumbled across a great foodie blog, Homesick Texan. Great to me, at least. There seems no shortage of great recipes on the wide Internet for how to serve the fresh cranberry beans, heirloom tomatoes or fava beans I’ve drug home from my farmer’s market, but although delicious, they all seem a little soul-less. But not Homesick Texan. The entire blog is dedicated to the kind of food that at least looks like my childhood and my favorite places. It is funny to write that considering my mom is Texan only by transplant, but somehow casually browsing this blog, I was reminded of all these long lost loved foods – jambalaya, chile con queso, pralines, enchiladas, ribs, …

Just saying. These ads mixed with the latest accusations that Obama runs with terrorists smell awfully familiar.

We had guests in town over the weekend and Will came home from school Friday with a fever of 102, so I am running a tad behind. To add to the delay, I spent the evening whipping up procrastination pants… You know, guilty sewing.

Will has three new pairs of the softest flannel pajama pants and one pair of silky soft green big guy cords.

When I showed him this morning, his eyes lit up, “These are pajama pants? But, they are so soft!” Clearly he has yet to learn that all the best things in life are inappropriate for polite society.

Below, wearing his unhemmed new cords.

What I’m doing in the 7 minutes after I’ve stopped doing something useful, but before the India team comes online for our status call:

The eyeballing game.

Whack-a-bone

The New York Times has an article by Michael Pollan asserting that one of the results of our market down turn is an inevitable rise in food costs. Interesting read.