October Is Over

We've had weird weather this year.  October's bright blue weather was rather scarce.  

I always like photos of my three grandsons together. 

At Home.

And in the Yard.

Lynette turned 22, complete with candles.  I don't know how many more years of candles she'll have, but there still are plenty in the cupboard.

We went to the National Arbor Foundation Place to find out some more about trees.  You can't buy trees there, but we each got a free one.  I picked a Redbud and Jim and English Pine.  There is a wooded hiking trail with marked trees on which we found this enormous catalpa leaf.  I'll admit I have small feet, but this is one big leaf!

We took a tour of J. Morton Sterling's mansion.  When they started out with the idea of homesteading that grew into growing and selling apples, then researching agricultural methods to make the most of the land, their house was a 4-room affair.  The 52-room house in my pictures was built around those 4 rooms. There may be a lot of rooms, and it was elegantly decorated, but the rooms are small.  

We also took a tour of their heritage apple orchard and we each got to choose the apple we liked best.  I choose a big yellow apple that we can't remember the name and Jim chose 'Kid Orange', a sweet apple with rough brown skin. 

On our way home we blew through a Lincoln nursery and bought a Blaze Autumn Maple and a Golden Ginkgo and planted one in the front yard and one in the back.

We harvested our sweet potatoes.  

This is a sweet potato, really.  It seems like the first potato under the vine often turns into a big ball like this.  Really, we looked it up on the internet.  We don't know why it does this and neither does anyone else.  It just does.  

I cleaned it and cooked it and ate it, and it seems just like a normal sweet potato.

I suppose costumes for kids at this age, are for the parents rather than the kids.  Paislee enjoyed rummaging around in our candy bowl, but Milky Way and Skittles, aren't really good for 14-month olds, so she had to leave them behind.  Since she doesn't know what they are, it doesn't really matter. 

She's such a cute little lamb.