Halloween 2015 and Chili Cook-Off

The end of October brought a whole lot of fun our way, including a trip to a farm the day before Halloween that we'd never been to before with a bunch of friends . The super fun thing about Sharp's farm, is that it's mostly groups who come and set up a time just for their group to be there. Or in our case since we were a small group, there was one other small group there. But it felt like we had the whole farm to ourselves!

We drove down a looooong dirt/gravel driveway and met up with the rest of our group. While we waited for everyone to arrive, we were allowed to feed the chickens and the bunnies. Once we were all there, the farmer took us into a barn to talk to us about the different kinds of corn and beekeeping. After trying to find the queen bee, he lead the kids over to a giant pail of feed corn, and the kids happily ran back and forth from the pail to the pen of goats. I'm pretty sure Jonah dropped more food along the way than what made it into the goats' mouths, but he had a blast!

(they really did have fun on the hayride!)

After goats, we went on what I would consider one of the best hayrides I've ever been on. It was long and looped us around fields on the farm, and then through a not so little creek where I thought for sure we would get stuck in the middle or a child would fall overboard. But everyone survived and it just made it that much more exciting! The guy driving us around stopped at the pumpkin field where we picked our pumpkins, and then we found our way through the corn maze for little people. We ended with picking our own corn ears for making pop corn at home (which we have yet to attempt!) It was a lot of fun, and something that we all said we want to do again next year!

On Halloween evening, we continued our tradition (for the second time ever) of having some friends over to help hand out Halloween candy and watch a "scary" movie. My sister came and we took Noelle and Jonah around to some houses to trick-or-treat. Jonah was Nemo and Noelle was a giraffe without a head (last time I'm getting her a costume with a hat!) I allowed Jonah to suck on a lollipop while we walked around, and as soon as he got another one, he dropped the first one to open the second one. I took it away from him, and he threw a fit, so I dropped him off at the house with Luke, and my sister and I continued on with Noelle. After she complained that her bucket was "too heavy", we headed back to join the party to eat food and watch the movie.

My one friend and I are not big fans of scary movies, so we looked up how the movie (The Others) ended, and were able to watch it without being too creeped out. The movie the group picked was, as Luke put it, more atmospheric than actually scary. You always think something scary is about to happen, but there was really only one jumpy part. Overall, it was another fun year of trick-or-treating and hanging out with friends.

This past weekend, our little town had a chili cook-off so we headed down to Main Street to get the free tastings. There were so many good types of chili, and even though the samples were fairly small, we were too stuffed to try them all! But it made for a free lunch and fun time walking around as a family.