::happy halloween::

Happy Halloween everybody.  I'll post about our festivities tomorrow.  We didn't get around to carving our pumpkins today, but hopefully that's going to happen tomorrow too.

Max is a wizard here, not a gangster--just so everybody knows. It's a costume Kathy made for him a couple of years ago, and he's never agreed to wear it until now. It's amazing.  He doesn't change his mind that often.
It's all due to our exciting Halloween movie that we made for the party. It inspired him to want to be a wizard. So in tribute to him, please enjoy our silly movie. It's pretty long, so don't start it unless you have 12 minutes to waste!

Max Halloween Movie from Ginna Hendricks on Vimeo.

::halloween par-tay::

We hosted a little halloween party for all of the residents and their families. About half of us ended up coming--lots of people were out of town and such. But we had such a great time!

I started out with some fun decorations.

These bats turned out looking really fun.

Some party favors for the kids.

I made this ghost with my mom a long time ago. It's enjoying the blacklight we put up in our little mudroom/front hall area.

I made a big batch of the delicious Hendricks chocolate chip cookies--with peanut butter chips as well. Mmmm they were good.
The highlight of the treats though was Erica's homemade oreos. Wow were they good.

And easy to make too. So thanks for the recipe Erica!


Our first guests were Joanne and her girls Claire and Francie. Claire was a very cute ghost. I think Francie won the best costume award for the night. She was a garden gnome and it was a perfect costume for her. So cute.

Somehow I didn't get an official photo of Joanne, but she was a pirate. And looked pretty swashbuckling too.


Then came Brian. Looking awesomely like Dwight Schrute. I especially like the nunchucks. And all the gear hanging off his belt.


Then came the Boboias. Very excellent costumes. Bonnie was a very cute Bee, little Carson was an octopus, Vincent was an organic banana and Dan took the cake as Richard Simmons.


Then came Chad, Melissa and Grant. Melissa was a soccer player (which evidently is her classic costume), Chad was a referee, and Grant was a baby giraffe. A really cute one.
Max was a giraffe too. So we tried to get a picture of the baby giraffe and big giraffe together. Things were just a little too exciting though and all the kids were running all over the place.

Plus I couldn't really get back far enough to get everybody in the picture. And extra parts of people kept getting in the way.

For a second Grant forgot he was supposed to be a giraffe and thought he was a seal.

This one is really cute of Grant.

And here's the best I could do.
But much later we caught them both hanging out on the bed together.

They're buddies.

We ate and hung out.
Francie thought for a bit she was Santa Claus, and wanted all the babies in her lap. The funny thing is that the babies weren't that much smaller than her.


The kids had some fun in the blacklight. It made the fun vampire teeth from the favor bags glow very nicely. Max loved those teeth. He loved being a rabid giraffe.

Yikes!

I didn't get a good picture of me, but I was some sort of princess--like maybe an elf princess or something cool. Kris was a wizard. A cute one.

Here we are watching the movie we made especially for the party. It's a Max halloween movie. I'm going to post it here later. It was fun to make and Max loved showing it to everybody.


We ended the night with a little guitar hero. Some of those at the party hadn't ever gotten the chance to enjoy it before.

But it made the kids insane and so we stopped and everybody went home.
It was a great party and we were glad everybody could come, and that their costumes were so awesome. Yay for Halloween.

::new pumpkin::

Sad story. The other morning Kris came out to leave for school and his pumpkin was gone. Yes, the awesome hugeness of his pumpkin was missing. And the really sad part is that Max's little pumpkin was smashed on the neighbor's driveway.
Somehow my pumpkin and Sultan's were still there on the porch. Weird huh?

I didn't really know what or how to tell Max about it, so I just didn't say anything and when we left for school I waited to see if he would notice.

He faked me out. He didn't say anything about them until we were in the car. Then he noticed the smashed pumpkin. But luckily he thought it was the neighbors. I told him that pumpkins can smash sometimes when they're dropped, and somebody must've accidentally dropped it.
Then he told me that his pumpkin and dad's got lost. I don't know what he thinks happened, but he's positive that they're lost. And I didn't argue that with him. That way I didn't have to tell him about mean people stealing stuff from us. No little people need to worry about that if they don't need to, at least in my opinion.

I was the helping parent at his school that day, which was fun. As soon as school was over I took him over to a place that had pumpkins and he picked out a new one. He seemed to be fine with everything. I was relieved.
So no humongous pumpkin for Kris to carve. But he'll use Sultan's. Good thing I was dorky enough to get Sultan one in the first place!

Now the pumpkins get to spend the night inside. Wish we would've known to bring them in earlier! Now we know for next year. We live we learn!

::pumpity pumpkin patch::

Last week we went on a quest to find ourselves some really great pumpkins.
We headed out to a farm in Massachusetts hoping to pick some for ourselves.

It was a cute farm. It looked like they also had pick-your-own raspberries and flowers. Unfortunately for me the raspberries had pretty much all died the night before when it froze outside.
The first thing we saw there at the farm was a big truckload of huge beautiful peppers. And since I've recently taught myself to like peppers I could really appreciate them.


We waited outside until a tractor came to drive us out to the pumpkin "patch". You'll see why I put that in parenthesis later.
Off we went on the tractor, and it was cold and chilly out there! It was the coldest day we've had so far.

Cute boys!
The tractor dropped us off at a little corn maze. (In which I think all paths led out to the "patch")
This was Max's first corn maze. He thought it was pretty cool.






Then we popped out the other side, and there we were at the "patch."

Does that look like a patch to you? I've never seen quite such an orderly patch. Pretty amazing the way they get them to grow like that!
Last year we went to a great patch in Kansas City and we really got to choose and pick our own. It was really fun. So that's more like what we expected. But this was fun too. Just kind of more civilized than we were really going for.

So anyway, we went to find our own special pumpkins. Kris spied his right away. There was no question.


It took Max a few tries to find the right one.





"Picking" pumpkins is a lot of work.

But picking up huge pumpkins is a lot harder.

This was the biggest pumpkin we've ever had by far.



Cool dudes with some cool pumpkins.


I picked the one on the right for Sultan, and then found another cool orange one. Perfect for a scary or cute face.

Then we headed back to the tractor. Or at least we tried to.

But Max's pumpkin got a little heavy for him after about two seconds of carrying it.

And tried to wimp out.
But he had to carry it himself or leave it behind, because Kris was carrying the heaviest pumpkin ever, and I had two medium sized ones plus a camera. So he toughed it out, and somehow even climbed the steps to the tractor bed with his pumpkin.  He doesn't like to have to show he's actually tough because then we make him do stuff.

He almost dropped his pumpkin in the parking lot on the way to the car, but he made it there too luckily.

And we sat down for the bouncy ride back to the parking lot.

All in all, even though we didn't get to pick anything, and didn't get the chance to get 100% muddy we had a great time. We got great pumpkins and would do it again!

::crash!::

On the way to pick up Kris this morning for a dentist appointment Max and I were in a car accident. :(
I hate car accidents!
I was going through an intersection (I had a green light) and a lady came along really fast, ran the red light and hit me broadside on the passenger side. I guess we call that a T-bone or something?

She hit me so hard that the car skidded and tipped and spun around until it was facing the complete opposite direction from where we originally were. Needless to say it was really really scary. Luckily because Max and I were both on the opposite side of the impact we were ok--I don't even think that we hit our heads or anything. So thank goodness for that.

So there I was sitting there in the middle of the street, facing the wrong direction on a one way street. Luckily some nice guy hopped out of his car and called the police and offered to stay as a witness. The police came pretty quickly and finally helped me to move the car out of the street. One of the cops drove up and was like "I sure hope you weren't driving this direction!" Like he thought I was driving the wrong way down the street and just plowing people. I was like, thanks for the vote of confidence!

I called Kris and our awesome friend Dan let him take his car and drive down to meet us.

The lady's car was totalled. Kris took a iphone picture. So here you go.


Her car isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

But check out my awesome close to indestructible Land Grover.

It doesn't look GOOD or anything, but it's still alive. It just looks tough, right?

It still drove. So when we got all the paperwork done I was able to drive it home. But when we got home we realized there's probably some structural damage. The back door isn't hanging right and won't close. Not to mention the passenger side doors.

So on to the fun of dealing with insurance. Hopefully we'll have a rental car in the next day or so. It's tough to deal with a broken car when you only have one to begin with!

Here's Max's rendition of what happened.

He's actually been in more than one accident. Unfortunately. Some of you may already know, but we had very bad luck with our first Land Rover (the white one) and I had two accidents in the matter of about a month in 2006. Both weren't my fault. The first one crumpled up the right side of the front, and the second destroyed the left side.
Max was in the car for the first accident, as was my dad. It happened in Utah while we were visiting for Thanksgiving. Kris's mom was in the car for the second accident. That was while they were visiting for Christmas. Nice, huh?

This is why when Kris fixed it all back up he put a monstrously cool bumper on it. Nobody's going to break another one of our headlights!

But I have to say, after all these accidents I'm happy that the Land Rovers have always taken such good care of us. The accident today was by far the most violent and scary I've been involved in, but the interior of the car, even on the effected side looked perfect. So I'm glad to be a land rover driver. Hopefully I will still be one once the insurance people get through with us.

Now if only we had been video taping when it happened. Max told me a few weeks ago that he thought that "next time you have an accident you should have the video camera so we can watch it." So after he stopped being the big-eyed scared silent boy, pretty much the first thing he said to me was "You should've been video taping!!!!"
Whatever.

::newport with grandma part 2::

So like I said in part 1 there were lots of beautiful kites at the park and we had a lot of fun.

The kites were definitely irresistible the take pictures of!






We sat and enjoyed the view for a while. Kris finished up the food from lunch.

For some reason Max thought it was time for him to take some pictures. Not sure where he would've gotten that idea....


Then he decided it was time for his favorite park activity. Tag.
He's really terrible at tag. He's not fast and he's a little lazy. Also, I guess his legs are a lot shorter than the rest of us, so that could explain why he's pretty easy to catch.



He always calls for a few safe spots. Usually one of them is me. Wherever I am. One of them is usually Sultan, if he's around, which he wasn't.
Here was his other safe spot for the day.


He would dart out to try to catch Kris.

Then Grandma joined in the fun.



Then Max got caught. A whole bunch of times.



Cute, huh?

We were getting ready to leave when suddenly there were all these big huge bubbles floating towards us.

Some guy had set up a tent out there had some sort of machine or something that was blowing all these bubbles. There were tons of them. Every kid in the park was suddenly right there--it was like the pied piper was calling or something.
There's not much more fun in life than bubble chasing. It's high on the list of awesome.



I just wish the it hadn't been so bright out. Getting pictures that look good was hard, and it was especially hard to capture the bubbles.

But I did get a few fun pictures.
And then we called Max 20 times and he didn't come. Then somehow he finally decided to come back to us and we went home.

The grown ups were all tired so we went home to rest. Max didn't let us rest, but he never does.
It was a great day in Newport!