Month: October 2013

I have always loved this time of year. FALL IS THE BEST SEASON OF ALL!  I love the holidays, the scenery, the weather, and the traditions I keep with my family, and for all sorts of other reasons. Here are just a few of them. My TOP 10 REASONS why the Fall Season is the BEST! 
               
1. I LOVE GOING BACK TO SCHOOL!  I am a teacher and I just love all the excitement of kids and parents planning for a new school year. Everybody gets new clothes and backpacks and lunch pails (who doesn’t remember their first Barbie or Hot Wheels Lunch Pail?), a new haircut and shoes, and we get to meet our students for the year and decorate up our classrooms. It is a lot of fun for a teacher to do Back to School.

Back to School Buses with some of our school rules….

 We haven’t seen our teacher friends for a few months and it’s fun to reconnect again. I laugh at the Staples commercial where moms and dads are skipping happily through the store with carts full of school supplies while the kids trudge unhappily behind them while they are singing “It’s the MOST wonderful time of the year!”. I concur. 😀

Balloon Festival at the park down the street from us…her’s the hubs taking pics

2.HARVEST FESTIVALS!  I love the harvest time. Up here in Utah at the end of summer there are lots and lots of festivals celebrating the harvest. We have Peach Days, Onion Days, Scarecrow Festival, Lavender Days, Raspberry Days at our Bear Lake cabin and many others. Each  and every festival is unique and lots of fun. Some of them people dress up for too like Swiss Days in Heber and the Witch Scavenger Hunt at Gardner Village.  I love to go to a pumpkin patch or pick cherries or apples from an orchard with family members too. I like to then go make things out of my fruit like cherry crisp or fresh peach pies.  I enjoy going to a pumpkin patch too. Do you have to be a little kid to enjoy it? Nope. You can just smile at little kids enjoying it. 😀

Raspberry Days at Bear Lake where we have a cabin. It’s a blast.

Here are my cute little granddaughters at one of the festival picture booths.

Fall Festivals are so much fun in Utah.  I love them!!  I love the fall scarecrow festival and the witch scavenger hunt at Gardner Village. And who doesn’t love getting a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch? We love it!

3.MY BIRTHDAY is in October. Well you can’t blame me for liking my birthday. You have to go on an adventure as you get older and have some kind of new experience. That much I have learned. Because as you get older your birthdays start to suck. So you have to change it up. Try something scary or new. Go experience a concert, a new sport, go see a wonder of the world. My brother and my nephew and I all share a birthday. So it’s fun to message each other and remember birthdays past that we’ve done together. It’s fun to get 100 likes on Facebook for your birthday too and get new things you buy yourself for a present (like my cool, new laptop I’m writing on right now). Spoil yourself on your birthday no matter what season it happens on. I try to also give presents or a party to somebody else near my birthday so I don’t feel like it’s a sucky day. It makes it lots more fun to give than to get.

The Band Perry Concert – I got tickets for the Hub’s birthday!

Hiking Dog Lake above Brighten Ski Resort in Utah

The hubs and I at Mary’s Lake above Brighton Ski Resort.

Grandpa’s 87th Birthday Party at my house in September.

Hanging out with some of the great-grandkids

Singing Happy Birthday with about 30 of the family gathered. Family is so fun.

4. HALLOWEEN PARTIES AND DECORATIONS! I just love seeing black and orange and purple and lime green decorations all over the stores right now. I love a cute witch or frankie and I love to see Jack o lanterns decorated in all sorts of ways. My favorite time to decorate my house is Halloween time. I have almost more decorations for Halloween than I do for Christmas! EEK! I know, it is an illness. 

Drink station at a Halloween Decorated Dinner Party I had recently.

Entry table all in orange and black.  I love me a good Halloween Party. Add some dry ice and bobbing for apples and a pumpking carving contest and a bunch of weirdos in costume and you can’t help but have fun. And add some little smokies pigs-in-a-blanket that look like mummies and some green jello and some kind of meat on a stick  and you’ve got it made!

My favorite holiday and some of my favorite decorations are at Halloween time.

Getting ready for trick or treaters.

Fun treats for the kids made from rice crispie treats and M & Ms. s.

Ladybug Lady at Halloween. I love dressing up! And my grandkids coming over in costume to trick or treat grandma is one of the best traditions there ever was. I love those little witches and pirates. And I always plan something fun to give them like trick or treat baskets, stuffed animals, glow in the dark toys or some rice crispie treats on a stick or candy house

Halloween Party in my classroom with my grandkids and I as ladybugs and bees.

My daughter and her 2 oldest kiddos.

Trick or Treat! My first Granddaughter Marisa.

5. THANKSGIVING FUN! I love having people over for turkey dinner and eating till I’m stuffed with all of my favorite foods. And everybody is always so happy on Thanksgiving. There are no expectations like there are at Christmas. It’s just a fun holiday to get together.We play games, decorate gingerbread cookie houses and we pin the feather on the turkey. And we always go to the movies in the evening after everybody has gone home happy.

Entry tables and coffee tables are so pretty in the fall! I love the rustic colors.

  I always have lots of fun pulling out the Thanksgiving Plastic Bins and getting reaquainted with all of my cool Fall decor again. I love the fall colors, the fake leaves, glass pumpkins, and scarecrows!

I love pretty placemats for every season and scented candles and silk flowers too.

I love Thanksgiving almost as much as Halloween Decor.

 Here’s the family and lots of Autumn decor on an end table in my great room. Every year it looks a little bit different. It’s fun to decorate for each season of the year.

Fall picture wall….I change out the flowers and ribbon color and usually put a new swag of beads along the wrought iron picture holder.

Thanksgiving table decor

Kitchen counters…..

I have lots of end tables I decorate for each season…..I get carried away….

Pilgrims and Indians….

Thanksgiving decorating

Kiddie table I decorate for Thanksgiving every year.

6. HIKES IN UTAH MOUNTAINS in early October. It’s not too hot, not too chilly, and the autumn colors on the mountains are just awe inspiring! I love the mix of orange, yellow, green and red. And the animals are all about too. Just yesterday I saw a young family of deer walk across the street as I was driving home from school. I couldn’t get my camera out fast enough! 5 little deer will just make your day, believe me!

Hiking Minnetonka Caves in Idaho with my sis.

Hiking around Sundance Ski Resort in Utah. We didn’t see Robert Redford though…sigh….

Bridal Veil Falls hike on a pretty October day with the grandkids…..

Just above ALTA Ski Resort look what we saw hiking….it doesn’t get any better than this!

Hiking in October is really the very best weather…..

We are surrounded by a dozen lakes and reservoirs to hike around– this was Bell Canyon Reservoir in October.

7. I LOVE THE FALL SPORTS!  I love watching the World series in Baseball, and the start of Sunday Night Football. It is fun for my hubs and me, and for the guys in the family to get together and talk about our favorite teams while eating great football snacks

Fun Football Snacks

 

HERE you can check out how to tmake these soft pretzels for Monday Night Football!

 

 We make little individual pizzas in these cast iron pans They turn out like Pizza Hut deep dish pizzas.Gotta love football snacks! And I LOVE pigs in a blanket!

Football Snack Pizzas

8. FAMILY QUAD RIDING AT THE CABIN in the mountains during the Fall season. It is one of the most fun family outings a family can have. We take the little ones and put them on the back of the 4 wheelers in their own little helmets and go tour the national forests around our cabin. The weather is nice and crisp and breathing fresh air when you are doing something physical and beautiful at the same time is a rush. I love it!

Fall Family photos and quad riding….

The beauty of nature on display…..

Some of the most fun times we’ve had are riding the quads as a family up in the mountains above Bear Lake.

I’m always at the end of the pack…lol….   I love coming in half warm half cold to get by the fire and drink some hot chocolate and grab some BBQ chips after riding quads or hiking out in the mountains of Utah. It’s just so neat. My hubs is a biker and he loves that too. I love watching the pelaton of bike racers whizzing around a curve at the mountain bike races they have right near our cabin too. But I just take the pictures. I don’t bike.

I love quad riding out in nature.

9. MY GARDEN  looks good but it’s not as much work as summer gardens are.  I’ve done all the back breaking weeding and hoeing and mulching all summer and everything has slowed down but everything still looks good. It hasn’t all died yet but the workload has shrunk down to nothing but the occasional odd weed or watering. Mostly it is just beautiful and colorful with fall orange and red foliage, a harvest of green, yellow squash and orange pumpkins and red apples from the trees and vines and lovely fall mums and shrubs in shades of orange, yellow and burgundy.

Fall gardening…when the deer don’t eat the lilies I am a happy camper.

It just makes me happy. Every year I put down a new door mat in fall colors for my front door and add a beautiful fall wreath with some Hobby Lobby Doo Dads of some sort.

It is just inviting to walk up my front path in the fall seeing the green pine trees, the aspens and the fall leaves changing colors on our other trees and shrubs. Fall is the best season for beauty in nature, I think.

I have 4 fruit trees and lots of veggie gardens……and 2 ponds.

Some of the fruits of my labor…..

10. FALL FASHIONS  I love when all the new fall sweaters and scarves can come out and I can cover up with some of my favorite boots and overshirts and sweaters and scarves. I love the new fall looks in magazines and trying new fall colors of jewelry and nail polish. It all feels new like a new school year.

Even though I love Christmas in the winter and Easter in the Spring, and a good, long, summer vacation, I’ve always loved fall the best. I remember skating down my street, my cheeks flushed and pink, panting and happy with my new, red, birthday skates, loving the weather and being outdoors. And here I am 50 years later and I still feel exactly the same way. FALL ROCKS!