Hayes is Three!

Hayes celebrated his birthday with friends family and pumpkins.  Hayes enjoyed playing with friends at Chuck-E-Cheese after coming back from his month long vacation in Hawaii where I believe he reigned as a little prince.   We also discovered that there is something worse than Chuck-E-Cheese on a weekend and that is Tanner's Orchard on a weekend.  We went to Tanner's to pick out a pumpkin but the lines were unbelievable and it was just a mess.  We also celebrated Hayes' birthday with my family and Catherine decided to have all the kids decorate pumpkins and that was fun for everyone except Hayes who didn't want to have anything to do with the activity.  We couldn't even bribe him with M&M's much to his mother's chagrin.

Max, Me & The 8th Tennessee

My friend Bryson is a Civil War Reenactor and invited Max and myself to Kenecuck park in Danville to join the 8th Tennessee infantry unit.  We camped in the period campsite and my back is still sore from the period cot.  There was a lot of marching and we got to fight in the skirmish that they put on for the spectators.  Max carried the flag into battle and I tried to fire the gun without embarrassing myself.  The confederate fought valiantly but those damn yankees outnumbered us by quite a bit and I kept hoping I could die so I could get some rest and not have to remember the difference between shoulder arms and order arms.  It  was definitely and interesting experience and we got to meet some great people, so maybe we'll live to march another day.

Octopus & Puddle Jumping

One of the great things about Hawaii is it's food which is often eclectic because of all the different cultures, but one truly unique Hawaiian food is poke which is a type of seafood salad usually made with raw fish.  Max and Laney have been helping cook dinner so I thought they might like to make some poke with some baby octopus I found at the asian market.   Max seemed excited about the prospect but Laney was a little grossed out.   So I had Max cut up the octupus and some raw tuna and we made some pretty good poke which even Max said he liked.  The kids also wanted to play in the rain outside when it started to pour a few weeks ago and so they got their suits on and took Hayes out for a little fun playing in the puddles on the street.

A hui hou kakou 

Peace Love & Pumpkins

Once again it's time to celebrate with friends and family at the Pumpkin Festival.  It was fun but I was missing Hayes because he would've loved it.  Enjoy the pics of the festivities...

Garage Cider

Of course the Gudeman's make their own apple cider in the garage, why wouldn't they?  The kids and I got to spend some time helping with the process and what a process it was.  You have to wash the apples, slice the apples, pulverize the apples, dump the pulverized mush in the apple straining bag, and then press the mush with a special contraption put together by Toby to extract the apple cider.  We ended up filling the bucket within a couple hours and we're still enjoying the fruits of our labor...well, not my labor, someone had to take the pictures.