Home Base For Learning: It's Fall

Last week we spent time in the Salt Lake area. While there, we were able to visit most of the kids' grandparents and great grandparents again.

Before we left on our trip, we picked most of our pumpkins.

We call these Jack-be-Bigs

A couple years ago our Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins cross pollinated with our Jack-Be-Littles. The following year, we had these large disc shaped pumpkins growing all over the garden. The vines are self pollinating and incredibly prolific. They taste good too. J named them Jack-be-Bigs.

All of these came from one volunteer plant. Volunteer meaning we didn't deliberately plant it, it just came up and we decided to let it grow. It's the only squash we grew this year as we still have plenty of squash from last year's bumper crop. We grew nearly 4 dozen pumpkins last year, so to have only 11 this year is just fine. Yes, all 11 of these came from the same plant. We would have had at least 3 more if not for the deer getting into the garden and having a feast.

While we were gone, the deer took care of most of the tomatoes and our colorful fall flowers.

We've got to get a better gardener

We spent a lot of time traveling this week, but the kids continued to do math, reading, and art.

Proud mom moment was when K decided to draw a fat cat all all his own. Normally, he likes to copy directions of other people drawing. So to have this come straight from his imagination was amazing.

When we got back from our trip, another Crunch Labs box was waiting. A1 and K had a blast experimenting with it.

We also went to a corn maze, three mazes actually, where the kids got to practice their leadership skills as they guided us through each maze. They also learned the not-so-secret trick to get though any corn maze without getting lost.