Today after dance and soccer we went to St. Charles for the Scarecrow Festival. It was really hot today, upper 80's, maybe 90 which I hear is odd for this time of year, but it was a lot of fun. The kids painted pumpkins with glitter glue. Good thing they let us leave them there to dry because Cade globbed a whole bunch of green on top for the hair and I'm not even sure it will be dry tomorrow. We picked them up on our way out and carefully carried Cade's back to our car without incident.
Next stop was making our own scarecrow. We knew this wasn't a good idea, but the kids REALLY wanted to do it. So, we got some panty hose for the head (I pray they weren't used) and some old clothes that were donated. Then we followed the directions to stuff and assemble our scarecrow. All the while Brett, Maddi and I are sneezing and itching from the straw/hay (is there a difference?) we are handling to stuff the guy. We tried to talk the kids out of continuing, but to no avail. So we finally get to the last stages and realize the head is falling off and one of us is going to haul this guy around with us.
The kids took a picture with their scarecrow and we informed them we are leaving him there and if he's still there when we are walking back to our car we'll bring him home. Cade reminded us to go get him 4 or 5 times before we finally let him know that we couldn't bring him with us because we were all allergic and he'd be in pieces by the time we got to the car because he wasn't sturdy enough. He was ok with it, but we promised we'd get some other decorations for our house and decorate tomorrow. People in the midwest sure seem to get into fall and Halloween, so I guess we're giving in to the peer pressure and getting our house up to par!
There was a scarecrow contest with 100-150 entries. Some of them were really cool like this Wizard of Oz entry. The heads were all pumpking that were painted.
This was another favorite from the Colonial Cafe which is the restaraunt with the kitchen sink ice cream that I wrote about previously. If you click on the picture, it will fill the whole screen and you can see the kitchen sink and notice his arms are boxes of ice cream.

Cade loves the movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and these scarecrows are the main characters. Jack is the guy with the white head and I don't remember the girls name. It's a pretty cute movie. I could have posted a lot more pics of the scarecrows, but these were some of the favorites.

The kids are already asking to go back next year. It was a really nice festival with so many activities, food, games, rides, crafts, a craft show, paddle boat rides and much more. Another fun filled Saturday for the fam. Tomorrow it's Nutcracker practice and a birthday party. The kids are out of school Monday for Columbus Day and we are supposed to go to a pumpkin farm if it's not raining.

Happy Birthday to all of our friends and family in the last week. Every day since September 27th, it's been someone's birthday. Many more to come the rest of this month!