Cold, Dreary Monday

We received a lot of rain last night. Woke up this morning to a river in the back and in front. I was up most of the night with Madi but didn't think that it had rained that much, I sure didn't hear it. Madi has been sleeping horribly this week. The wind has freaked her out and she doesn't want to go to bed at night. Once she finally falls asleep, she is usually up again around 2 am and ends up sleeping the rest of the night in our room. And then nobody gets any sleep. I finally got her baby mattress back out and put it on our floor for her. She sure goes through these cycles of bad sleeping. I'm ready for this one to be over.

If it isn't Madi keeping us awake, it's Oliver. Since Friday morning he has been having these coughing spells and they are deep and loud. I took him to the vet Friday because he wasn't himself and hacking all over the floor, yuck. Ends up that he has pneumonia and is on antibiotics for two weeks. What a pain.

Saturday we had a pretty fun and adventurous day. We went to the Yesteryear Museum here in town for their Harvest in the Fall. They had a bunch of old tractors and people doing demonstrations of how people farmed and lived from the the late 1800's to the 1960's. It was a lot of fun and a lot of stuff to see. Chris knows one of the Board Members who also had several old tractors there that he restored. He needed some extra drivers for the tractor parade so Chris got to drive one. Chris will probably be out there next year with our tractor. The highlight of the event was the Steam Engine Tractor that was brought in for the show. It's from the 1880's and it was the first piece of farm equipment to be powered by something other than horses. It sure seemed like a lot of work. It took three guys to drive the thing and it was huge and slow. Pretty sure there weren't a lot of farmers in those days that owned them new.

Late afternoon we went to the Pumpkin Patch. Dan and Jane came out to pick up the lawn mower and ended up going with us. We took the tram out to see the Bison. Wasn't as neat as it was last year. They don't take you into the same pasture with them anymore and by the time we got out there, they had all moved to the opposite side of the field, so we didn't get to see them very well. But Madi didn't care. She had more fun pointing out all the "buffalo chips" than actually seeing the buffalo. The man behind us told his daughter to watch for buffalo chips when we got into the fields. She started yelling out, "there's a buffalo chip" and of course, Madi being the follower she is, started doing the same thing. So, the whole trip she was looking over the side and yelling out "there's a bufawo ship."

We then played in the kids area and went and picked out pumpkins. I have taken her out the last three Halloween's. The first year she slept in her car seat the whole time, last year she wandered around but didn't really care about the pumpkins and this year all she wanted to do was load up every pumpkin she could pick up. I ended up taking some pumpkins out of the wagon, she just kept putting them in. Each year she keeps getting more and more fun as she learns what we are doing and why. After I arranged the pumpkins on the front porch yesterday, she keeps picking them up and kissing them and saying "I wuv pumpkins!" I always try and get three different sized ones for each of us. As I laid them out, I told her "this one's daddy, this one's mommy, and this one is Madi." She turned to me and said, "where is Oliver's?" So, we rearranged so we had all four of us.

I included some pictures from our adventures on Saturday and also a little video of some of the cool things we saw. Enjoy and have a great week!

Love, Amy