Punkinmania and Japan

I’ve run out of catchy titles for our annual trip to Punkinmania. One thing that you can never count on, the weather. A few years ago we had snow. Last year was quite mild. This year, it was in the upper 70s. It was like Punkinmania in Florida! This year, with two big walkers, we were able to really whoop it up. Though we did have the reality of Loran leaving for Japan only a few hours away hanging over our heads. But as long as we had him, we were going to cram in as much family fun as possible.

Loran took Ella and Lillian into the fire truck and I brought Ella through the ambulance. Ella was very interested in the ambulance, and Lillian freaked out over it and would not enter.

The girls picked their pumpkin swiftly and then both picked a gourd.

  

This year we tried our hand at the games. Ella went straight for bean bag toss. She dutifully stood at the line and lobbed her bag towards the board. Lillian was no rube. She walked right up to the board and chucked her bag in the hole. Despite breaking all of the rules. Or, the only rule, Lillian was rewarded with more tickets than Ella’s consolidation one ticket. Ella then tried her hand at fishing and caught a bag of candy. We then cashed their tickets in for some beautiful skeleton necklaces.

A couple of hours later, we were blazing a trail for the airport to drop Loran off for his 11 hour flight to Tokyo. Our first night went well. We stopped at Target on our way home and picked up a new Veggies Tales movie about listening and obeying, popped up some popcorn and learned some valuable lessons about listening to your parents.

As with most trips, there is always some sort of problem. Vomit, house malfunction, dead car battery…something typically happens. It’s just a matter of what and when. This one hit right away on Sunday. We got up leisurely and were enjoying some family time before heading to the farm. When I was downstairs getting ready, I kept smelling something foul. Ironically, the closer I got to the cat’s litter box, the better it smelled. That’s how bad it was. Wouldn’t you know, there was a mouse in one of our traps. However, from my vantage point, I wasn’t entirely sure it was a mouse. Perhaps larger? And it wasn’t a traditional mouse trap, so I had no idea how this one worked. I had to go regroup and figure out how I was going to handle this situation. The longer I thought about the creature downstairs, the larger it got. Suddenly, it was definitely a rat. Awhile later, a squirrel and within minutes, it was clearly an opossum. But, Facebook saved me again…I’d posted a “woe is me” type entry about my predicament and my uncle called to see if I wanted the mouse removed. It turned out to just be a mouse. After the mouse was removed, I was doing some extra cleaning and found a FULL sippy cup under a dresser in the basement, of unknown age. The milk was solid. Needless to say, our basement smells much better now. That was the only problem of the Japan trip. The funny came after we’d picked Loran up and he was home that evening. I went downstairs and heard Ella run across the house saying, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” she halted in the kitchen and said, “Mommy? OH NO! Mommy went to Japan!!” Apparently having Daddy go to Japan resonated with her.