After a year off, we joined with Aiden and Alayna once again in the quest for candy, this time with a puppy in tow. Reed, who at age six months last Halloween was too young to trick-or-treat, got a taste of this sweet tradition this time around. His sister, who for days was waffling between her new favorite of rock star and her old of Abraham Lincoln, finally realized that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and went with the presidential look.
It’s time to play the Pyramid!
There’s nothing quite like grabbing a good book, settling into a comfortable couch – or a plastic clothes basket – and reading the morning away.
Christine O’Donnell, U.S. Senate candidate and Tea Party darling from Delaware, famously declared that she is not a witch (as did SNL’s brilliant Kristen Wiig, in satire), but there were plenty of witches – and goblins, superheroes, doggies, and rock stars – at the Halloween party at the UU this evening.
The local pumpkin patch just added this giant bouncy thing to their list of to-do activities. The sign said that it was for kids of all ages, which we took to mean that it was okay for those of us who are kids at heart. 
The nearby public university goes all out for their homecoming, especially when it comes to the parade, which snakes through the downtown area and campus, and always attracts a sizable crowd. The kids like seeing the floats, but they’re most excited about the amount of candy that’s thrown in their direction by the parade participants. The parade serves as a pre-Halloween Halloween, and although their teeth and bodies will face a barrage of sugar at the end of the month, it’s mighty tough to tell your children, even the 18-month-old, to hold off until then. 
Stellar means outstanding or immense, of course, but in its literal sense it means of, relating to, involving, or resembling a star. It is born of the Latin word stella, meaning star.
Aunt Liz showed her niece and nephew some love when hanging out by the lions at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
According to the World Food Programme, 925 million people worldwide do not have enough to eat. In the U.S. alone, it was also recently reported that more than a million children regularly go to bed hungry. Community-wide events such as CROP Hunger Walk take place to raise both awareness and funds to end hunger at home and around the world. For years now, my mother has been deeply committed to CROP through her church, and although she missed participating in her community’s walk because she was visiting us, she was able to walk in our local one.
My parents are in town, and their visit happens to coincide with the annual farm tour and potluck offered by a local organic farmer, the one who provides us with our weekly vegetables summer through fall through his community supported agriculture (CSA) program. On this day we sampled many delicious foods, my parents took the farmer-led tour, Reed made us chase him through the fields of greens, and Olivia helped prepare the pear-and-apple cider.
In this family, we’re not adverse to celebrating half birthdays – the proof, they say, is in the 
