Trick or treating tonight. And Alex is all grown up...he decided not to go this year. Or rather, only to the few houses in this neighborhood but not out to town. The girls did want to go. They did their skeleton costumes again. Beth was doing Bible study so she dropped them off in town on her way out, and I just had to meet them at Carrie's mom's haunted house in town at 7. I went around a bit with Alex, then he stayed home to hand out candy (no one came) and I went to meet the girls. We met up a bit ahead of schedule, so I just let them walk along the roads, followed them and told them for Halloween I was being a stalker.

Last Thursday was our Halloween...rather, fall festival, program at church. In the evening people brought their kids in costume to play games and have hot dogs and popcorn and jump in the bouncy house. I wore by Robin costume again from last year, but added some round glasses and a wand and went as "Robin Potter, the boy wonder who lived." Nobody got it. Also same as last year I manned the plinko board. Natalie was still sick so she stayed home with Beth; Alex and Missy came to "help" me man the booth. Which they did a little. Yesterday was a Halloween program at Black Pine Animal Rescue, where you could come in costume and see the animals. But they added a hayride, too, so it was fall-y. Busy place, too. They had candy. Alex wore his "Sans" costume, who is a character from some video game (basically a skeleton in a hoodie), the girls were both skeletons (Missy wore a skeleton t-shirt, Natalie did all the skull makeup). This week we also gave the cats another flea treatment pill, and we're seeing results already. Almost nothing is on them any more. We wonder if Ruby got the whole pill last time.

The girls at IKEA

Fall break in Chicago again. The school quarter is over, Beth did the parent-teacher conferences without me this year to simplify things (they just have all the teachers in the gym at once and you pick who to talk to) and we got good reports for all 3 of the kids, and all 3 kids made the honor roll, yay! So to celebrate (kind of) we went to Chicago. I took Thursday and Friday off, and late Thursday morning we drove to the city, and spent a good part of the afternoon at IKEA. Most of the time we were there, Alex was off playing Pokemon Go, and the girls were off goofing around and taking funny pictures of themselves. Which we didn't mind as long as they weren't disruptive. So I hope they weren't too bad.   For an IKEA visit, we got off easy, spent less than $100. We checked in to the hotel, then went to Medieval Times for dinner (Natalie had never been, which was a shame). Third time for me, now. Same show as the first two times, but still fun. Friday we went into the city and hit the Art Institute. The girls once again were off taking funny pictures of themselves for most of the time, at least after lunch. Alex, I believe, was bored out of his mind the whole time. Missy was pretty bored too, when they weren't doing the pictures. But I think Natalie really liked being there. Saturday morning, we drove back to the city and went to Lincoln Park Zoo, which is free which is good, but if you can't find parking at the zoo, that can get expensive. But the zoo was nice, even if the habitats seemed small. Again Alex was off by himself playing Pokemon Go for a good chunk of the time. We finally headed from the zoo to Willis tower, since the wait was so long last time it scared us off. I thought it would be fun to take the El from the zoo to the tower, which it was, except the El station nearest the zoo was much farther than I thought it was, and we walked for quite a long way before getting there. The ride was fun enough, though. But the wait was even longer than we thought because we had thought the advance tickets we bought online would allow us to skip the lines, which it did not. Well, we did get to skip the line to buy tickets but no others, so it was about 90 minutes instead of 2 hours to get from the entrance to the top. But everyone was happy to finally get there. After we were done with the tower, Beth (with her torn meniscus, we think) was done walking, so just Natalie and I rode the El and went back to the zoo to get the van, then came back to pick everyone else up. On the El ride back, though, everyone in the city was already on board headed to Wrigley Field for a Cubs playoff game (which they won, earning the right to go the the World Series) so the train was as crowded as I have ever seen. But we made it, and drove back to the Tower (although we went through the Wacker Drive tunnel for quite a ways, where there is no GPS signal, so I had to guess where to exit and did so poorly). We picked them up and headed home.
Oh and by the way, we had ALL of the carpets and couches in the whole house cleaned last week, hoping that it helps control the fleas. They said they only saw any activity in one place on the couch. Things have been better with the fleas, but we can't get them all off Ruby. Iris has been fine,

Beth took the girls clothes shopping most all Saturday morning…without me! Ha Ha! Later on we took all the kids off to Mentone to Goshert Farms for the corn maze. They have a bunch of other stuff there too, but mostly it’s for the little kids. But we wanted to do a corn maze and theirs was the most reasonably priced around. The kids went off by themselves, no drama with getting lost this time because everyone had a phone, but Beth and I must have just made every correct turn because we found our way through the maze in what must be record time. The girls came out not long after. The I went back in to look for Alex and wound up getting a bit more, well, not lost, but going down the wrong ways, for a while (Alex found his way out long before I did).

I received a surprise in the mail this week…a new digital camera! Oops. I was looking at them on Amazon last week and I must have hit the one-click checkout or something (didn’t know that was on). So, one of the cameras I looked at showed up on my doorstep within a couple days. But it’s a nice one, and I decided to keep it anyway. Why not.

This weekend had such potential. On Saturday the kids all went to a youth group event at SkyZone in Fort Wayne, so they were gone from 2 until 7 pm. Beth is starting to ramp up her soup business so after we dropped the kids off at church we did some quick shopping at Menard’s for jars and such, then she started working on soup. Since she was doing that I hitched up the camper (with the pool strapped on top of it) and towed it to the storage unit I rented this past week. It took over an hour to get it into the unit (and a long time to drive there very slowly with the pool in tow), and I didn’t get it in until someone stopped to help me. The ground is gravel and a bit sloped, and the unit has a pretty good bump up that I couldn’t get the camper rolled past. No room to back it in, either. But once someone stopped to help we got it pushed right in. So I am looking forward to being able to garage the truck this winter. When I got home with a couple hours left in our afternoon off Beth was done with soup and wanted to go out for sushi. That’s all. Later on in the evening, I took the girls to the annual haunted house down at the fairgrounds, which I must say was pretty impressive and larger in scope than I would have imagined. Natalie and I went through it; Missy went with us to the fair but waited for us at the entrance. Not that she was scared, she just didn't want to go, but I told the kids we'd get ice cream afterwards if they went. Alex wouldn't even go for that. Today, we skipped church because Alex didn’t sleep well because of his cold, and they were all pretty tired anyway. So I spent a few hours working to cut up the fallen limb. It was less wood cut up than it looked like as a limb, so it wasn’t so hard to load it into the truck and haul it away to the Harrison’s.

Beth and I had a date afternoon today because the kids went to SOS. Today, the kids went up to Kercher's orchard to pick apples to take to...someplace, not exactly sure. But they were gone for a few hours this afternoon.