Haunted Hayride

I took the boys to the Clayville Haunted House and Hayride this weekend. Kids' hours, of course. The real thing is far too scary for me, let alone these two! I couldn't get any photos in the haunted house, but here are some snaps from the hayride.

It started out with smiles and brave faces. A hayride. Fun!

There was even candy. Goody!

But as we got closer to the haunted house, things got a bit more creepy. Now, the actors were all in costume, but stopped to hand out candy to the kids and smile nicely. Its just that as we got nearer to the haunted house, the sets and extras became a lot scarier.

These faces say it all. After we got off of the hayride and walked up to the door of the haunted house, Kel was not going in. No way, no how. Antoine and I convinced him, but it was touch and go as he rushed through the rooms hyperventilating, hands over ears, refusing even to take the candy that they were handing out. Poor kid does not do scary.

They survived! And no doubt we'll be back to do it again next year.

Sunny Fall Festivals

Here is a little pictorial roundup of some fall festivals that the boys and I attended over the past few weeks. The first batch is from the A-Maze-Ing corn maze and fall festival in Auburn. The second set is from the Indian Summer Festival at Lincoln Memorial Garden.

The weather has been phenomenal so far this fall, nothing but sunshine, blue skies, and long warm October days.

The boys race up a Jacob's Ladder obstacle to see who can ring the bell first. These two are so competitive.

They allowed children to have darts. More to the point, they allowed my son to have darts! Glad that the booth operator came away unscathed. They were popping balloons. It was good fun.

Fishing! This looks lame, no? Well, these two nearly ended up in a fist fight over who was catching too many fish and who wasn't allowing for an equal distribution of the fish and how unfair it was that Antoine was catching fish of two colours when Kel had decreed that each of them had a set colour. Competitive, I told you.

When it came time for face painting, Antoine knew immediately that he wanted to be SpiderMan. Always a boy's boy.

Kellan decided to go with the fall theme and be painted as a jack o' lantern.

Now to the Indian Summer Festival at Lincoln Memorial Garden. The boys love to decorate pumpkins. My big complaint being that in the past two years, they've started using paint, rather than the glue and decorative objects that they supplied in the past, and the paint literally peels off the minute that the pumpkins begin to dry. So the boys put a huge amount of effort into their creations, only to come back a few hours later to pick them up and have all of the paint flake off on the way back to the car. Might be skipping this little craft next year.

The boys got to build Fairy Houses, using all natural materials that had been found around the garden. They did a really nice job and took the task very seriously.

Antoine refused to be in this photo, but Kel is my always-cooperative little model.

Caramel apples are a necessity after lunch at the festival. A very messy necessity.

I told Kel that if he kept making this face while I tried to get a photo of them both eating their apples, I would put it online. And so, I did.