::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!

::bishops ball::

Last night Kris and I got to go to a big charity auction ball for the hospital system Kris works for.

It was a big fancy event.  Luckily since we're poor residents we got in free.
Even luckier, I had a dress that I bought for a dance in dental school that I could use.  So it was a pretty affordable fancy evening out.
Here we are.  Don't look too closely at my hair.  It looked good before I did some sort of silly last minute adjustment for the picture.  I need to learn my lesson about that!


Our sweet friend Rachel from our ward came and watched Max for us. He was so excited to get to hang out with her, he talked about it all week. So it was nice for us not to have to worry about him at all. He was in very capable hands. Thanks Rachel!


Here we are at the event. I think this photo is so light because the flash was busy bouncing off Brian's fancy hairdo down in the corner.


Here's a big group of us from the hospital. It was fun to get to see everybody out of the work context. And fun to get to hang out and dance a little bit!

Here we are with our friends JoAnne and David (on the right) JoAnne is one of the residents in Kris's year. On the left is Dr. Kane. He's the program director.

We had a blast. It's nice to get a night out together once in a while.  Thanks again to Rachel for taking care of the cute little boy, and to Chad and Melissa for the pictures!!

::he's a child of god::

In honor of finally having the primary program over with for another year, Max and I made some fun music on sunday.

I think grandmothers and grandfathers will especially appreciate this, as Max sounds darn pretty adorable in this first song.

And they're only a video because I couldn't figure out how to post them here otherwise.  So I stuck a couple of my pretty fall pictures from last year on them.

The recording quality is pretty bad, so don't listen too close dad.  It's all just for fun.

And this is the other version we did.  It cracked Max up when he heard it.

::newport with grandma part 1::

On saturday when Kathy was here we took her out to Newport to show her the beautiful sights.
It was really crowded and busy, but we were lucky to somehow find a parking spot. So we parked and took a walk down the street of the cute little downtown area.
We stopped for a bite to eat. The food wasn't too good, but the company was excellent.






After we ate we did a little shopping. We got Max some nice flip flops for next summer at 50% off. We looked in a lot of cute store windows.
Then we walked down a pier and got a fun view of the water and a lot of boats. We could also see the huge cruise ships parked out in the water that kept vomiting old people in fanny packs out into the town.

We took a few pictures. Of us, not of the old people or the cruise ships.










After that we went back to the car and took the car along the lovely ocean drive so we could see all the big beautiful mansions. It was such a pretty day with lots of sunshine.
There's a stretch of Ocean drive that has park on one side of the road and ocean on the other. As we drove up to it we saw some crazy stuff flying in the air. We stopped to investigate.

It was a flying octopus thing. Attached to this beautiful kite.

Cool, huh? There were lots of beautiful kites flying.
And.....that's the end of part 1. So watch for part 2!