october skies

whoa! october is almost over! the month has passed quickly and busily. time, what i have so much of, still eludes me, because i am a poor manager of it. neither am i very organized. hence, that still-rushing-around feeling of not having enough time.

here is something that wastes alot of my time:



we get a gazillion free magazines from random airlines for unused miles. i finally got the oomph and desire to toss all these into a huge pile for the recycling bin. i think it was literally hundreds that had been stacked into piles all over our apartment. and yes, i read thru, flip thru, or skim, whatever comes thru my door. ridiculous really. (and unfortunately, i probably have over twice as many in the storage unit. why do i save these?) but i will tell you that even after i made the gigantic pile, i still asked greg if he wanted to go thru it and rescue anything he wanted to read still. so the pile sat there for a few days with us stepping over it! (part of me was also waiting to change my mind.) but finally, it landed, with many trips, to the resting place it needed to go. recycled!

so along with weeding our apartment, i've been weeding (still) our europe photos. the other day it took me four hours to quickly glance thru each photo of only half of our files! yikes! there are soooo many photos, and my desire is for us to pick our favorites, of greg's, francis's, and mine, and make a book out of them. but the selecting of photos is going to take forever; it is mind-numbing. i hope to be done by spring. also very disturbing is the fact that all of francis' childhood is on this danged computer, and i don't have an actual real physical photo album for him since he was 2 years old. now THERE is another huge chore...







we finally managed to hit a pumpkin patch while it was still october. last saturday we went and joined up with our friends the fairbanks for some fun in the glorious sun. the kids had a blast in the corn maze, and all the other treats the farm had to offer: cider that burnt your lips off. candy apples that broke your teeth. pumpkins so huge you couldn't lift 'em. ahhhh... childhood memories! and we finally had the time to carve them last night. i have to say: carving is now an absolute breeze, now that we finally got ourselves some actual pumpkins carving tools. i used to mock them, like they were just marketed to sap your money when you have perfectly good utensils at home. so we would go home and labor with our butcher knife, and spend hours scraping with an ice-cream scoop. i hated it! can i just tell you how much i love that little plastic pumpkin scraper, and that tiny saw that looks like it wouldn't cut thru cardboard but slices a pumpkin like pie! oh my goodness! so francis can finally carve his own pumpkin without us fearing he's going to lose a finger. he hummed all the while he worked on his masterpiece. what is it? you ask? who knows! but it is "spooky-scary." (and now we can't get it out of our heads!)







francis is soooo excited to be what he has been wanting to be for ages: a star wars clone trooper. a real live store bought costume! my first gut reaction was "no way!" when i found out how much it was. i know, i know, my stingyness knows no bounds. but he wanted it soo bad. and every year we give him the speech about how much cooler it is to make your own costume. and he has been some really clever things. a WWII fighter jet pilot. or my favorite: the toucan.(?!) but greg decided this was the year we're buying his costume.(besides, how does one make a clone trooper?) he's been asking for so long and he deserves to be like the other kids for once. you know, plastic helmet, fake abs and everything. when we got home after buying it, he put it on immediately. he wanted to take out the trash with the helmet on. even though he could barely see out of it. he LOVES it. he has it laying out and looks at it every day, marvelling at how cool and "realistic" it is.

yet. walking to school the next day, he said: "my clone trooper costume is cool, but i probably won't get as many compliments on it as my toucan costume, because i didn't make it myself." and that made me sad that in our efforts to steer him from costly tacky plastic costumes, we somehow sent him another message. we over-emphasized the creative aspect and "coolness" of making your own, and this is what we get. i told him: don't worry, you're friends will think this costume is awesome. and then he said: "maybe i'll be the toucan again next year." (?! milk that sucker for all its worth!?) and i said: you know, we can always make something new and different. you don't have to be a toucan again just to get compliments.

and i found my efforts to console might just send wrong messages again.(sigh) i had no idea he was so looking for compliments. do we not give enough? we must not. i was reminded (again!) of how young he still is. he's 10 and he's a kid. and i feel a little sad that sometimes our efforts are to convert them over to our side of the argument, which they succumb to because they don't know any better, and hey, we're bigger. but they know what they want and sometimes, we're just being stingy. or impatient. or selfish. sometimes, maybe just sometimes, money does buy happiness. and for a kid, it goes a long way...