Dakota's Days

I have been lucky to be able to slow down and take some time with Dakota.  We have Tuesday and Wednesday mornings together.  We have no agenda and I have been following his lead on these days.  Lately, Dakota has been very interested in neighborhood walks.  So this week on Tuesday we went out walking.  He noticed that many houses were decorated for Halloween.  We observed and talked about all the different ways to decorate.  His favorite was definitely, SCARY.  He was super keen on getting home so we could decorate our house.  And for the next 3-5 days, he spent all his free time making scary things for our house.  He would get on a roll and make lots of one thing.  We started with fire. and then quickly moved on to ghosts and ghosts and more ghosts.  Then it was a shark in the ocean.  Then skeletons, bats, witches, dragons, clones, vampires, and finally spiders.  So our house as you can see from the pictures is REALLY SCARY!!!!

I was really most impressed by his concentration and determination.  He started out by asking how to draw the thing.  I would show him the essential parts of the scary thing and then he would draw it, cut it out, come get me to give him tape and then go tape it to the window.  And he would do this over and over and over again.   Then he would take a short break but come back with another idea.  "Oh mom, dragons are really scary, we need to draw some dragons."  "Okay," I would say and we would go look for some books with pictures of dragons then talk about how to draw a dragon by looking at what things were in the picture and then he would be off and running on dragon production. 

In addition to completely covering our house with SCARY things, he has a pen pal.  She lives next door.  Her name is Augusta Farnum.  It is the cutest thing.  Almost every day he writes her at least one letter,  sneaks over to her house (by himself), and then puts the letter in her mail slot in the door.   She is the mom at the house next door and every day that he sends her mail she diligently writes him a quick note and sneaks it over to our house.  Here he is mailing her a letter in reply to her sending a note about ants eating her apple.  She wondered where they were taking all the apple pieces.  He wrote back that they were probably taking them to their nest and drew a picture of ants and apple pieces in their nest. 

And here is a great photo of Dakota playing in our front garden.  I asked him to stand here with this amazing bush so I could capture his camouflage.   Oh, happy days with my sweet boy. 

Hiking in the Blue Mountains

This weekend we explored our own "backyard."   We had a great family day starting with Klicker's Pumpkin Patch. 

 Here we all are having fun picking our pumpkins and sliding down the giant slide.  What fun!

Then we headed to our closest mountains, the Blues (The Blue Mountains).  Up Mill Creek (the creek that runs by out house), we followed the road until it turned to dirt.  Then followed that up the mountain looking for a trailhead and a hike.  What we found was a surprisingly nice day in the mist where the sun would peak through and then the mist would come swirling back in.  Here are Dakota and Wren enjoying the misty day.

Here you can really see the mist that surrounded our hike.  We were all a little bit chilly not realizing that it would be quite so cold.  But we hiked to keep warm and got to munch on some wild blueberries along the way.

At the end of our hike we found this amazing tree completely covered with old man's beard. 

After the hike we headed back down the mountain to the Corn Maze.  A good maze with an underground tunnel and a bridge. Super fun!