Autumn Celebration Pics

We got out and enjoyed lots of different activities for our autumn field trips this year in brisk Minnesota! It's probably a good thing that we weren't in Oklahoma until after fall last year otherwise this fall in Minnesota would have felt a whole lot cooler! We know the winter will definitely throw us for a loop. This is the kids at the pumpkin patch for u-pick pumpkins. We've usually bought our pumpkins at greenhouse stores so this was a real treat. The little ones especially liked riding in the wagon.
They also had this huge straw tower for the kids to climb on. I like this picture (above) because it looks like the cover for a kids country album!

Gabie really liked climbing on it too but it was so tall that he needed a little boost. Of course, Mom was kind of afraid he was going to fall off so we made sure Vince was by him when he went up to the top.

Gabie had to decide which pumpkin he wanted by feeling and lifting them!

Here's us with our friends' boys that we're taking care of during the weekdays (whom we're also living with right now). I took them all to the corn pit at the 101 Market in Otsego. Having all six kids, especially during fun things like this, makes me wonder if we should have more kids of our own!

Here's Gabie as an autumn harvest mouse;

Faith as an autumn harvest mouse;

And of course Dylan!

The long awaited corn pit! We went last year for the first time and decided to make it an annual tradition. This year, we went early in the day on a weekday so we pretty much had it all to ourselves, which is just the way we homeschoolers become accustomed to having it! Vince hung out with the toddlers for a little while until I jumped in. . .

And Dylan did his favorite activity: filling up his shirt with the corn. We told him he needs to cut back on eating fast food!

Here's Dylan, Matthew, and Faith contemplating their next corn pit game idea. They had plenty of time, considering we stayed in the corn pit and played for over an hour and a half. They finally started getting rumblies in their tummies, so we went home for lunch. The next day, we carved our pumpkins and cooked a pie pumpkin for our homemade pumpkin pie. We read "The Pumpkin Parable" by Liz Curtis Higgs. It's my favorite book to read for this time of year. And now this week, we've started reading our thanksgiving books and started our thanksgiving projects. We're so thankful that God gave us such inquisitive minds to learn and we were definitely thankful for the opportunity to have so much fun! Finally, we're most thankful that we get to learn together as a family all the time, not just evenings and weekends. This stuff is way too fun to let somebody else do it with my kids!