Happy Fall Y'all!

Happy Fall Y'all!! Fall is definitely my favorite time of year...and in Texas, I consider fall from October 1st to January 1st. :) The greatness of fall starts with the first college football game and the first cool front and includes all of the yummy fall foods and smells like chili and pecan pie and eggnog and nutmeg and that fresh natural scent that blows in with the first cool front. It then culminates into the Christmas season where buying presents for the ones I love is a total blast and Christmas lights and Christmas trees just top off the year!
Our first true fall festivities this year definitely included Aggie football, but as far as the color orange goes, we got to hang out with some very special folks last weekend in College Station and take our sweet Goddaughters to the punkin' patch! We got to spend the whole day which started with a wonderful church service and lunch and then we went with the Maders to find the perfect pumpkins for carving.

Our precious memories with Karis & Kelsie

We love these folks!

2 of my favorite dudes!

My sweet bestest friend

Kare Bear & Kels enjoying the punkin patch

We took the pumpkins back to the Mader house, ate a yummy burger dinner, changed into PJs, and carved away. Derrick & I couldn't decide what to carve so our minds defaulted to marketing and we decided to do the Ranch Hand logo so we could post on the Ranch Hand Facebook page on Halloween. Karis and Kels got to help for a while before bedtime and Kelsie decided that she liked raw pumpkin seeds....icky! As Ian so eloquently put it "I prefer the smell of a deer being gutted to the smell of the inside of a raw pumpkin." LOL! Pumpkin innards are pretty gross. We did a pretty darn good job for a bunch of amateurs.

mmm...pumpkin guts! :)

Karis quite fascinated by the inside of a pumpkin 

Karis: "Pretty gross, Mom!"

Kelsie: "Not too gross, Mom!"

E, D, B, & C: "Yeah....pretty gross"....even with brown sugar or garlic salt

Artists at work

Final products

After the carving was complete, we started up a game called "Things" that B had given me as a gift a while back. We had no idea what we were in for. I wish I had gotten a picture of Derrick laughing, because I seriously have never ever seen him laugh so hard. He was nearly hyperventilating, and if you know Derrick well, you know he starts crying when he is laughing REALLY hard - the tears were tumbling! It was awesome. Milking cows and Spandex and Dope and Piggies going to Market and "....." and Big Fat Tub of Lard and so many other hilarious things took on a whole new meaning! (sorry, you had to have been there). 

From the Mader house, Derrick and I left for Kansas on another Ranch Hand Horizons adventure...only this one turned out to be a total colossal failure. We desperately needed the film but 6 days and 51 hours in a tree stand later, we had seen 1 mature buck too far to shoot. It was terribly terribly miserable. I'm pretty sure my bum is flatter from sitting on a 9"x9" piece of expandable metal for so many days. So, that was pretty disappointing, but life moves on. 

Traditionally, November is a month to express gratitude....and I just want to say I am grateful for a husband who is adventurous and loving - even if he does drag me to Kansas (Dorothy was wrong about Kansas by the way!) and amazing friends to make amazing memories with. There are a couple of other friends I'd like to see very soon as I miss them very much, but hopefully that will be sooner than later! 

What are you grateful for today??