October

As I mentioned last time, October turned out to be a crazy busy month of mommy me-time, beginning with my first craft sale the first weekend, my birthday the second, a solo trip east for a family event we couldn't all make it to after that, and my second (and last?) craft fair the fourth weekend. I'll get to Halloween in another post.  For the record, I kind of like having my weekends off.  I won't lie; I do like the occasional time alone at home that I get from weekend to weekend when Neal takes Elias to the playground or to run errands for a couple of hours.  But it's a real drag to work all week and then have at least half of your weekend occupied by standing on your feet for 7 or 8 hours straight with no break, smiling and repeatedly explaining and pitching your craft.  Even when I worked retail one year in grad school, at the very least I enjoyed a half-hour break in the middle of each eight-hour shift.  I gotta hand it to the hardcore crafters out there (although, not surprisingly, I've yet to meet many craft fair circuit types who have young kids at home). But, like anything, I had to try it to figure all that out. 

We did manage to sneak in some family time last month, however, with a birthday weekend trip to the pumpkin patch.  It's interesting as Elias grows to witness his interest in holidays and special events like birthdays develop.  Ever since his birthday, he's been pretty excited about each subsequent celebration: his Dad's soon after, a couple of buddies over the summer, and mine last month. 

He totally gets the whole cake, candles, singing, and gifts thing and seems to dig it all.  But holidays are still a little abstract.  I'll write more about Halloween weekend itself in my next post, but I will say, leading up to the holiday itself, he was pretty interested in pumpkins, decorations, and books about the event, beginning with our visit to a pumpkin patch in Livermore, about a half-hour drive from home.

Compared to last year's pumpkin patch field trip, which lasted all of five minutes and the pumpkins we got remained un-carved until they were tossed post-Halloween, this year's outing turned into an all-day event.  We chose the Livermore location from the round-up of local pumpkin patches featured on the 510 Families site.  I couldn't really find what I was looking for any closer than Livermore and it was definitely worth the drive.  In addition to scoring a couple of perfectly "plumply dumply" pumpkins, we enjoyed a corn pit, a wagon ride, a brief height check-up, a cow train ride (a bit random but, hey, cows!), and a picnic lunch sitting on bales of hay before our return home via a Dairy Queen detour (don't judge - DQs are hard to come by in the Bay Area...we had to).

You'll have to wait for my Halloween wrap-up to find out what we did with those pumpkins!