Trick-or-treating take one

We spent the morning waddling through downtown Dexter collecting candy from the participating businesses along the main drag (read: the one street in town), and the afternoon waddling around the rec room at our homeschoolers group Halloween party.

Waddling is what penguins do.

A doughnut for lunch?

Cookie decorating (and eating) for snack...

spooky searches...

making salt dough ghosts and pumpkins and gluey and sparkly crafts plus a plethora of homemade munchies warm fall drinks...Halloween party homeschooler style.

And when we got home Calvin dove right into his candy, but not to eat it. We pay him ten cents per piece that he turns in to us, so the candy sparked an hour of learning about money and counting up his earnings. He opted to keep only one piece to snack on (tomorrow, since we'd had enough sweets today), and earned $3.50 for the rest. After all that excitement we were too tired to carve pumpkins after dinner tonight, so that has been postponed, but still, the Halloween weekend has begun.

Picking apples

Today was our first field trip. Ever. We joined our homeschooling group for a tour of a local apple orchard and came away full of cider, donuts, and good, fall fun. Our group is large enough that we divided by age, us belonging to the group of young children, of course. We took a tour of the enormous fridge full of apples (that's a big fridge, and actually that many apples in storage don't smell all that good—apple overload), then we got to watch them run the press used for making cider, and the sorter used to wash and, of course, sort the apples by size after they are brought in from the field.

The tour was standard—exactly the kind of field trip I remember from my own school years, complete with donut, cider, and coloring books. I loved the guide, who talked about how important the bees were and encouraged the kids to be respectful of their presence, not freaked. She also shared a number of interesting nature and apple tidbits with the kids before setting us loose on the orchard and allowing us to pick five apples each. At 85 degrees it wasn't exactly fall-like, but they had beautiful trees that made me happy, and Calvin got a real kick out of picking the apples.

In his words: