10-25-14

 Today was Adam's last soccer game of the season.

Getting certificates

Picking out their pumpkins

This evening we had fun carving pumpkins.  The boys cleaned out the pumpkin guts and Adam helped me collect seeds.  Jacob went to the white board to draw out how he wanted to carve his pumpkin.  Adam poked holes first and then carved his. Eli told Daddy how he wanted his carved and they also used the white board.

Eli was saying, "This is so much fun!  I never knew this was so much fun!"

Cool looking jack o'lanterns!

This afternoon we took out one last cottonwood (total of 9).  We thought we were going to have a hard time because there were so many trees in its path but we hoped to get it to fall in between the aspen trees and the basswood.  We have the tractor to help us out or we wouldn't have even tried to take this tree down.  It had a large branch that got caught up in the basswood as it fell.  We used the tractor to pull the tree off its stump. Then we pulled it until it slid down the basswood where it was caught up.  It took out two large basswood branches.  We're hoping the basswood survives because its a tree that the bees like.  We still have a lot of work to do cleaning up but it was too windy today for a large fire.  We also took down a smaller aspen that was leaning into a maple.  I lifted Jared in the tractor bucket and he trimmed the hanging branches that had gotten hit by falling trees.  We have several oak and maple seedlings growing in the woods and plan to plant some more trees.  Jared also did some digging of the mounds of dirt by our ditch.  I stood there to make sure the tractor tires didn't get to close to the ditch and to tell him if the bucket is full because its hard to tell when your on the tractor.  The boys had fun playing on the down trees.   They also built some huge tents with blankets in the house.