Halloween and Pumpkins

Sorry, no time to post last week. It was crazy. I have a campus wide presentation to do in a week, and I had to prepare a draft for my committee to go over.

The weekend before last we made our annual trip to the pumpkin patch. Dermot really loves this, and honestly, so do I. We don't have a ton of traditions, but it seems like Halloween is inspiring some, and I love me some Halloween.

This year we met our friends Rich, Amy, and their 15 month old Landon at the farm. Landon just wanted to look at the scarecrows all day. What a cutie. Dermot likes this particular farm because it has a play area for kids. He got to climb bales of hay, crawl through tunnels, walk on balance beams, swing, and bounce on a mini trampoline. He loves it and it cost us two bucks. Then it was time to pick pumpkins. I always go overboard on this stuff, but I love it. We got two big pumpkins, 3 small pumpkins, 4 mini pumpkins, 5 funky small gourds, and one red mum plant. Dermot also bought a small straw scarecrow. I like to line up all of the gourds and pumpkins on my front steps. It's so autumnal, and it makes me happy. After an hour Dermot was ready to go, so we left our friends there. They stayed and took a hay ride and apparently the baby loved it. I've only been on one hay ride and I was sick as a dog - even with my allergy medication - so I don't push that particular event.

On Wednesday of that week, Dermot went to the same pumpkin farm with his class on a field trip. He said he had a great time. He spent a lot of time picking out just the right pumpkin for mama. The other kids picked out the biggest pumpkins, but Dermot picked out a really cute, perfectly shaped smaller pumpkin. With his class, he also went on the hayride and then went into the corn maze. He said it was really fun.

In other Halloween news, Dermot has dressed up as Batman most days since we bought him the costume. He did dress up as Spider-man, however, on Sunday. I'm so glad that he's not just wearing it for one day of the year. Both costumes were cheap (30 bucks for the pair), but still it's great that he's really playing with them. His passion for Batman just increases. We've been renting the cartoon "The Batman" from Netflix and he watches them all as soon as they arrive.

In food news, I am in love with a new soup. It's a variation of this soup, but I need to make more, and I made it a little more simple. I used 2 big potatoes, one whole onion, one whole cauliflower, three big carrots, 4 cloves of garlic, and 7 cups of water. I boil that until it's really soft and then I put it through the food processor in batches. It turns out orange and thick. After that I added 1 tablespoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of nutritional yeast, but I'm sure you could leave that out. I hate steaming the cauliflower, so this time I diced a few small red potatoes. I just steamed them in a little bit of water and added them to the soup when it was done. You could probably just eat the puree, but I wanted something else in the soup. I haven't done it yet, but I bet it would be good with some Baco-s added to. Yum.