Tis the Season of Pumpkins

I am sure we all know that this coming Saturday is Halloween and I am sure we have all been busy gearing up for this holiday season. Traditionally, summer is my favorite time of the year and I absolutely loathe its departure (I do live in the Pacific Northwest after all, can you blame me? I love sunshine!!). However, this year I have strangely been enjoying fall immensely.

That of course is aided by my love for EATING all things pumpkin, kicking that off with some ymmy pancakes. But now that we have a little one, we have been doing a little more with pumpkins than eating them. My sister does a pumpkin painting activity every year, so Adelyn and I joined her for that.



Then we went to a local pumpkin patch, which was a first for all three of us. It was an unseasonably warm and beautiful October Saturday, so we, along with the rest of the town it seemed, took advantage of it.

We finished off the week with some yummy pumpkin cheesecake muffins. I wish I could find the recipe online, but my sister brought it to me from her Rachel Ray Everyday Magazine. I suppose I will have to end it with something from last year's fall that was another pumpkin cheesecake twist. Hope you are all enjoying the season too!

Zipping through the Rainforest

On our anniversary I posted about our trip to Whistler. In that post, I said that we had gone ziplining and promised more pics, but forgot about it completely until now. It was so fun! We debated beforehand whether or not we were too chicken to try it out (I never was much of a thrill seeker, but now that I am a mom, it's even worse!), but we figured we might as well give it a shot. We were so glad we did because not only did we have a great time, but it was in the most picturesque setting too, in the canyon up above the Whistler Village where there is a beautiful rainforest.

We tried our hardest to capture the beauty on film, but as you saw from my picture of Mt. McKinley last week, our camera is not the fanciest (I refuse to blame it on personal lack of photography prowess). We were going off one of the lines and the guide went backwards and flexed. I thought it was a cool shot of her seemingly suspended in the air, flexing. So I suggested that Aaron go first and try to turn around so he could pose and flex for me to take his picture. Unfortunately...this is what I got.



Thankfully, there was a safety net to our little plan: they were taking pictures for you. Of course they were expensive, but we needed to capture Aaron's poses somehow. If only we had realized!! Then we could have saved the trouble and he could have just posed for them to begin with. You can decide for yourself who caught the better shot:



More posing that I hadn't even seen him do because the camera had shut off right when I didn't want it to.



Kickin it over the creek.



They took some of me too of course, but I wasn't quite as adventurous!

But I did have a moment of bravery toward the end of that line, that thankfully they caught because Aaron hadn't even seen it! Now it is captured eternally for our posterity.



On the last line they taught us how to go upside down and I ALMOST redeemed myself by ALMOST catching Aaron fully inverted. It still looks pretty cool though!

Our advice to would-be zipliners: just go crazy from the beginning because when you get used to it and stop being worried about crashing head first into the pointy rocks below, it is a lot more fun when you aren't holding tightly to the rope!

Happy adventuring!