A Baby House Visit

Fall is chugging right along, and since the last blog post, Jack and Pam at the Lake have become the proud owners of not one, but two, lovely pumpkins, so we're all set to celebrate Halloween in style. We haven't carved them yet, but both Jack and I are brainstorming some design ideas and will be pulling out our odd assortment of carving tools sometime in the next day or two. Stay tuned for photos in the next few days. You never know what we're going to come up with --

So... I'd been missing the little girls - and the big girls, too - and last week seemed the perfect time to trip myself over to the Baby House for a big, old dose of happy. Lucia was tickled to see me and glad to have me as a playmate, but poor Beatrice was in no mood for such nonsense. Her daddy was out of town at a week-long conference, and she was on the verge of sad already. Then, when Papa said, "Bye," to everybody and took off to come home to the farm shortly after my arrival, she hit the wall. Sweet baby loves her men-folk and misses them when they aren't around.

She's enough like Pammy, though, that a good nap can cure a bad disposition, and by the end of the day, she was smiling, showing me her puzzles, and mugging for the camera just a little bit.

Lucia and I made a pizza for everyone for dinner. Well... actually Jack did the hard part - he made the dough from scratch and sent it with me from home. Lucia and I put the pizza together. She grated the cheese like a champ with a real grown-up grater and did an excellent job dispersing the pepperonis onto the top of the pie. As far as she was concerned, making it was more fun than eating it, as she's recently decided that pizza isn't one of her favorite things, and no amount of including her in the process was able to change her mind. Beatrice, on the other hand, thought it was fantastic, and I scored that as a point in the win column.

Mom and Sis both loved it, too, as it was food they did not have to prepare after spending a long day with little children.

I didn't over-do it on the pictures this visit - I was too busy - but what good ones I did take are at this link:

Baby House 10/25/2013

October

We've officially hit fall, and I'm trying hard to convince myself that I'm ready for the change of seasons and impending cruise to winter, which begins this time each year with the nerve-rattling "BLAM-tink-tink-tink!" of the first acorn to hit our metal roof.

Football season alone almost gets me there, but some years I'm simply not ready for summer to be over, and no matter how exciting a game between Georgia and Louisiana State might be, I long for the scorch of a summer evening when darkness doesn't leave the starting gate until 9 o'clock, and the air is sweet with the scent of the invasive honeysuckle that's taken over one whole corner of the yard.

Maybe if I was one of those people, who sees each month as a new opportunity to recreate the theme of her home decor, I'd be a more willing participant in the change of seasons, but I'm not. I'm just not. No offense to those of you with an "occasions closet" and neatly organized boxes of tchotchkes for the spectrum of major, minor, and made-up holidays - I applaud you. I follow your boards on Pinterest and am amazed at the amount of creativity you commit to "National Stay-at-Home-Mom Month", which, I've learned, occurs each June and is celebrated with the colors of lavender and silver.

This time last year one of my facebook friends bought three hundred dollars' worth of pumpkins for the seasonal display in her front yard and had a different wreath to hang on her front door for each week in the month of October. There was the "Indian Corn" wreath, the candy corn wreath, and the homage to mini-gourds with hot pink breast cancer awareness ribbon. For the actual week of Halloween, she created a wreath with old baby-doll heads, mini-skeletons from Dollar Tree, Spanish moss, battery-operated LED lights, and a festoon of black velveteen ribbon. It was fancy. And creepy.

I grew up in a house where we carved a Jack O'Lantern for Halloween - well, we (as in Sis and me) didn't carve it; Dad carved it, because knives are dangerous, and pumpkins are full of yucky, weird-smelling stuff. Our Jack O'Lanterns weren't candle-powered like most still are to this day, because fire is dangerous, and Halloween costumes are flammable. Ours were lit by a 100 watt bulb dangled into the pumpkin by an length of old lamp wiring, because electricity is so much safer. Stuff like like that NEVER catches on fire.

The National Retail Foundation reports that in 2012, Americans spent $8 billion celebrating Halloween. Average spending on costumes, candy, and decorations is up 55% since 2005. Extending those numbers out to the entire "harvest" season and what is spent on straw, corn-shocks, dried corn, pumpkins, pots of chrysanthemums, and creepy yard sale baby doll heads makes the month of October as much of a spending holiday as the whole of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.

Good, bad, or indifferent, that's the way things go.

As for Jack and Pam at the Lake; we'll carve a pumpkin, and maybe, just maybe, I'll buy some mums.