God is Watching

Discussing plans for Halloween:

Pete: I like the houses where they leave out a candy bucket with a sign to take one

Dad: I'm sure you will only take one if you know that God is watching

Sam: Actually, that doesn't matter because the devil is the manager of Halloween

Sam's First Touchdown

Sam scored a nice touchdown to get his team off to a fast start in their flag football victory last Saturday.

Great Country Farms

Pete and Sam went to a new Pumpkin Patch this year called Great Country Farms.

Some cool things about this pumpkin patch:

• Sam and Pete each got a free apple from the gift shop
• The excellent rope maze
• The bounce thing
• Sam convinced everyone to get the homemade ice cream on the way out

Sour notes:

• There was some incorrect signage that said you had to take the hayride to the corn maze. After wasting 30 minutes on the "hayride" (just a ploy to make people buy pumpkins), they learned that you walk to the Corn Maze, despite what the sign and map said.
• poorly labeled "Craft Area"
• Broken exhibits: including Water Maze, overgrown ground maze, giant chess board

Black Ops

Sam got a perfect 42 out of 42 on the following quiz that Dad sent for Pete one day in his lunch:

Pete also got 41 out of 42.

When Dad has some more time, he will have to make another quiz with the weapons in Zombies.

Time To Dye

Pete's first Science project was due today. He completed most of it over the weekend. Of course, he called it "Time To Dye".

It was a pretty lousy assignment, but he stuck with it and managed to squeeze out a decent experiment. He also learned a lot about doing tables and formatting in Excel.

Paper Clips

Sam has been a bit obsessed with paper clips for the last week.

He made a paper clip necklace. His football coach was not too thrilled about this when he got to practice on Saturday morning.

Later that day, the following guy was seen on the kitchen table:

What will be next?

Flag Football

Sam is playing flag football this year in the i9 league. He is happy to be on a team with his friends Jackson and Nick from school. They play Saturday mornings at 11am, with practices on Thursday from 6pm-7pm and before the game Saturday from 10am - 11am.

In the photo above are:

Top: Coach Scott Robison (not pictured, Coach Gavin Myers)

Middle: Drake Robison, Jackson Myers, Bradley Gagen, Zachary Matthews, Jack Gagen, Nick Baker

Bottom: Ben Fremin, Sam Berman, Blake McClintock, Mason Corkhill, Keenan McCardell

Write Night

On Dad's birthday, the family went to "Write Night" at Pete's school (Farmwell Station). It was from 6:30 - 8:00. Pete missed his baseball game to go to Write Night, but it turned out that it was rained out anyhow. Pete also found out that he gets Extra Credit for attending Write Night!

The first activity was called "Silent Conversation". Here is the first page of Dad and Sam's dialogue:

The conversation between Pete and Mom was amusing, since they got into a paper argument. Toward the end they would violently scribble something and slam down their pencil.

Subsequent activities included doing a timeline and sausage poem. There was a bit too much lecturing, and not enough writing, but other than that everyone had a pretty good time.

Afterwards, they all went to the Coney Island Diner for dinner and got some chocolate cake on the way home.