MichaelandChrissy.com

Aiden was too young to carve pumpkins last year, but we thought it would be fun for him this time around.  We bought our pumpkins about a month ago, and they’ve been sitting on our front porch for a while.  This weekend was the last chance to carve them before Halloween, so we got to work on them.  We haven’t carved pumpkins for a few years, so this was a re-education process.

We picked up a carving kit last year (we love day-after-Halloween clearance items!) that included some awesome templates.  I picked out a ghost template that didn’t look too complicated and Chrissy picked out a “spooked” face.  The tools that the kit came with made carving easy.  We put down newspaper and gleefully cut them open.

The evisceration quickly got messy.  We stripped Aiden down to his diaper so that he could help clean out the pumpkin guts without ruining his clothes.  He didn’t like it.  Chrissy’s tiny carving saw bent halfway through, so she gave up early to take up baby duty.  I finished my ghost and then turned hers into a “puke face” pumpkin.  They turned out pretty nice!

Scheeringa Farms is a fresh produce vendor not far from where we live.  It’s a nice, family-owned place close to Cline Avenue and 45th in Highland, IN.  They have a petting zoo every year around Halloween, but we’ve never taken Aiden there before.  Chrissy’s Mom took Aiden last year, but Chrissy and I have never gone ourselves.  Well, today we took Aiden and Gavin.

Aiden enjoyed feeding the animals, but they were really hungry and sort of aggressive.  There was a vendor that sold animal food there, so we bought an ice cream cone full of seeds to feed the goats and llamas.  We didn’t get far with that cone!  One llama ate the entire cone right out of my hand!  I had Aiden in the other hand, so we both got mugged by that llama.  It was funny though.

We also fed carrots to some goats and donkeys.  Although the animals were hungry, they were very gentle, so no one was bitten while feeding them.  Aiden also got to pet the bunnies, his favorite animal.  He got to play the ubiquitous duck game as well.  Gavin slept the entire time in the Baby Bjorn, but he was under a blanket due to the chilly weather.  It was a nice little outing for a cold Saturday morning.

Gavin was baptised on Sunday, October 19th, 2008.  We now have two Catholic boys in the family!  Gavin was very good: he slept through most of his first mass, but woke up just before receiving his baptism.  It was a very nice ceremony.  Aiden was very good throughout the mass as well.  Our family members took lots of photos for us.

Afterwards, we had a family gathering at our house.  It was still early in the Fall, so we had the tents up in the backyard while the weather was nice.  Everyone had a good time.  We’re looking forward to spending more time with Gavin’s new godparents, Cassie and Nick.

We took the kids to the County Line Orchard last weekend for Pumpkin Days.  Aiden loved it last year, and he really enjoyed it this time too.  The trick is to get there early to avoid the crowds, especially on the weekends.  A tiny petting zoo is no fun when it’s packed with two hundred soccer moms, colliding double strollers and battalions of sugared-up children.  We were lucky, and the line for the Moo-Choo was miraculously short.

We have never been in the Moo-Choo before.  It’s basically a row of plastic drums, each with wheels and a cow head attached to it, tethered together and pulled by a tractor.  The tractor leads the fake cow cars along a path through the woods and part of the apple orchard.  The path was decorated with Halloween stuff and some of the trees were adorned with big happy faces.  I pointed things out for Aiden, and he craned to look at them.

Because we got there just as they opened, we got to talk one-on-one with some of the animal guides that were there.   There was a girl with a rabbit and some sort of fluffy baby bird.  She was nice enough to get down close to Aiden and let him pet the baby rabbit.   He loves rabbits, and always points them out in our yard.  He rarely gets to touch one, however.  There were plenty of animals for Aiden to interact with at the petting zoo though.

We even got to see Peter the Pumpkin Eater, a huge dragon with light-up eyes that talked (and sang!).  Peter is usually sleeping when we visit.  Speaking of sleeping, Gavin slept through most of the outing in the Baby Bjorn, but he did wake up long enough for Chrissy to feed him.  We didn’t want to be lost in the corn maze with a tiny baby, so we skipped that this year.  After the petting zoo, we bought a few dozen fresh pumpkin donuts (an annual tradition) and then headed home.

Tonight, we reached a milestone that we have long anticipated: Aiden has pee-peed in the potty for the first time.  We’ve been sitting Aiden on his little training potty for about six months now, just to get him used to it, but he has never done anything in it before.  Last week, Chrissy moved the training potty from his room to the bathroom so that the serious training could begin.

Aiden has an issue with warm bath water, in that he pees almost as soon as he hits it.  Gross, I know.  But tonight, Chrissy set Aiden down on the potty before she put him in the tub.  To get him “in the zone”, she splashed some warm water on him while he sat on the potty (like a sleeping college frat boy).  Sure enough, he started to pee.  We cheered.  He was so proud of his pee.

The next step will be to get him to come to us when he has to use the potty.  I’m not sure how quickly potty training is supposed to work, but it’ll be nice when I don’t have to change his diapers anymore.   I always tell him, “We wouldn’t have to do this if you would just pee-pee in the potty…”  But I shouldn’t get my hopes up completely, as we still have to tackle the poo-poo.  I’m so not looking forward to this.

On the day after Halloween last year, Chrissy and I bought a whole bunch of new decorations on clearance.  In fact, Chrissy left early that morning in order to get the best deals on the 50%-off holiday swag, and she grabbed so much that she had to call me at home to come and man a second cart.  We toted two jammed grocery carts out of Target that day!  We got two stand-up interactive monsters, a giant pumpkin, several new tombstones, a weird skeleton lamp post, and other assorted goodies.

Fast-forward to this year.  I usually wait until the last second to put up Halloween decorations, but the neighbors next door started putting theirs up last weekend.  Then the people across the street saw them doing it, and immediately ran outside to get theirs started too.  What’s the rush?  There’s still a good week of September left!  Of course, Chrissy saw all this and ordered me to pull all of our own Halloween decorations out of storage as well.

I had completely forgotten about last year’s post-holiday haul, so I was amazed at home much I had to carry down out of the garage rafters.  We almost have as many Halloween decorations as Christmas decorations now!  Well, maybe a 2:3 ratio, but close to 1:1.  I used as many extension cords to electrify everything as I usually do for Christmas, so that’s a lot.  I’ve got a big front yard, so I haven’t really been satisfied with our anemic Halloween setup until this year.

Everything looks really good though.  And I haven’t even put out my strobe lights and fog machine yet!  I took Aiden outside with me last night to plug in the final few decorations (the mosquitos chased me off the first time).  He’s enamored with the six-foot-tall monsters on our front porch.  And anything that even remotely looks like a cat.  He loves those.  We’ll have to see if he still loves them when they get all spooky on Halloween night!

The remnants of Hurricane Ike came up through the Midwest from Texas and hit Northwest Indiana hard. It rained for several days straight, causing all of the local rivers to flood.  The Little Calumet river crested and flooded many Northwest Indiana towns along its banks.  Nobody seems to notice the Little Cal until it rains too much, but no one could have expected the nine to ten inches of rainfall that we received last weekend.

The news is showing aerial footage of Calumet Avenue in Munster where the Target and all surrounding roads are under water.  Lake George has gone all wonky in Hobart (where I grew up) and washed away the Third Street bridge.  In Highland, the Highland Plaza parking lot was completely under water.  The Lake County Board of Commissioners declared a state of emergency Monday morning in the wake of last weekend’s record rainfall.

The heavy flooding is causing road closures all over the place. The Borman (80/94), which runs parallel to the Little Calumet, was closed from 394 in the west to Cline Avenue in the east. The Bishop Ford was closed completely. The onramps to the Borman were under water at Calumet Avenue and Kennedy Avenue.  Cline Avenue was closed as well, but I’m not sure how bad the flooding was there.  Since I live south of the Borman, I couldn’t get to work at all this morning!

I was listening to the 9-11 memorial on CNN this morning, and I was shocked that it has been seven years since the World Trade Center fell. That was a crazy day. I remember seeing the first tower fall on the tiny television in our Chicago office, and shortly afterward looking up at the Sears Tower once our building had been evacuated (the NeuStar offices were right across the street on Wacker). Hundreds of people crowded outside, and we were all sure that Chicago would be next, and we were standing under the biggest target. Just looking up.

Although I had never seen it before, I was very impressed with John Stewart’s words in the eve of September 11th, when he returned to the Daily Show after the tragedy. It was devastating for everyone, but worse still for those actually in New York that day. To be able to actually feel the ground shake, to see the clouds of debris, I can’t imagine what that was like. But “to grieve, but not depair,” that about sums up the American resolve going forward.

Legend has it that Orville Redenbacher lived in the same subdivision in Valparaiso as my Aunt Linda, before he sold off the company and moved away, so the town has had a Popcorn Festival ever since.  The Festival is situated downtown, with the Courthouse at its center, and they close off a bunch of streets for the event.  There are booths with arts and crafts, an annual parade, and lots of food.  Everyone that I knew would be there every year, so it was always nice to catch up with people and talk downtown.

I actually saw Orville Redenbacher once during a Popcorn Festival.  I was about 15, and he came out from behind a building, flanked by a bunch of businessmen, on his way to give an opening speech or something.  I remember thinking how old he looked in real life, since I had only seen him on TV prior to that.  He walked right by me, but I was too stunned to say anything or even wave.  I mean, this was Orville Redenbacher, in the flesh, and being a boy from small-town Indiana, I had never seen a famous person before.

Every year, for as long as I can remember, I’ve gone to the Popcorn Festival towards the end of the summer.  So I can say from experience that it has been going downhill in recent years.  There used to be lots of arts and crafts, but now it’s mostly infomercial crap.  For example, I saw three booths for bedsheets, several for cheap sunglasses, and a couple for back massagers.  There were only about a half dozen for the crafty kitsch that we dig, but we had already seen those same vendors at the Blueberry Festival last week.

The upside was that they have a kids area a few blocks east of the Courthouse with face painting and the duck game and some other kiddie attractions.  There was a huge inflatable slide, and Aiden and I went down twice.  Getting up there was a chore though, since the ladder was very steep and Aiden had to go in front of me.  It would have been easier to toss him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.  It was a tough climb, but worth it because Aiden loved the slide down so much.

We threw Aiden a birthday party this weekend, even though he doesn’t turn “2″ until next weekend (we had it early because next weekend is Labor Day and people might be out of town).  Aiden had a sports-themed party, complete with a White Sox baseball birthday cake, a basketball hoop in the yard, and decorative pennants for all sorts of sports.  Aiden’s favorite word (next to “Uh oh!”) is “Ball”, so sports seemed the way to go this year.

The weather channel said that it was going to rain on Saturday, so we had made alternate plans to pile everyone into the house.  Luckily, there was no rain.  The sky did darken a little bit, but that was kind of nice because it cooled things down (it had been muggy and powerfully hot all day).  Timely, that was when we let Aiden open his presents in the back yard.  He got plenty of birthday gifts, but he really wanted to run off and play towards the end.  Just a few more presents to open, buddy!

Everyone had a good time, especially Aiden.  The only ones who didn’t appreciate the party were the group of hornets that took up residence on our deck.  Chrissy noticed them in the morning and her dad “relocated” them (to hell).   Thankfully, they were gone before guests started to arrive.  There were a lot of little kids over that day, and bees would have complicated things.