The Feger Family: Pumpkin Patch! With Uncle JT

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Pumpkin Patch! With Uncle JT

My littlest brother is going to the Philippines for 2 years. That's crazy. It's not crazy that he's going on a mission for our church, all of my 3 brothers and 1 of my sisters have gone. What's crazy, is the whole idea of a mission, and that it's considered normal! He has saved up all of the money himself to pay for the whole thing himself. He'll leave BYU where he's getting great grades and is on a dance crew. He's not even going to be able to dance or practice there. He just gave his ukulele away to our cousin, he won't be able to practice that either. He's going to live with a stranger, a couple of them. He's going to have to eat local food, and he's not that adventurous when it comes to sea food. He'll do fine with learning the language, teaching what he knows, serving strangers, loving everyone, embracing the early to bed/early to rise routine, but it's still amazing! I wonder if he has even had any second thoughts. Probably not that have sprouted from his own mind, just when others might have asked him. He masters whatever he has put his mind to and has great self control and wonderful examples and goodly parents and a testimony of the Savior's plan for all mankind and impressionable cute nephews who will write him so he has a lot going for him.

He came home for the summer to be a lifeguard before he left. His mission call said he didn't report to the Missionary Training Center (MTC) until Halloween, and since he was just seasonal at the pool, he had time to hang out with us for a couple of months! He taught some of my friends' kids swim lessons and went to a flippy gym and danced and studied a lot. I went to a movie with him and he babysat for me a lot. I'll miss him for more than his helpfulness with the school car line though. Sometimes I called him to just play with us.

Since he'll be at the MTC on Halloween, we went to a pumpkin patch with him one afternoon.

I took balloons that were left over from Tyler's morning photoshoot. I like green and purple (if only I had a girl) for pumpkin patches since orange is so boring. This balloon about flew away until Jonathan flew up to get it! He was holding Tyler and still was able to jump high enough to catch it!!!!

I'm not sure what look I was going for with the kids and balloons and pumpkins.

So I tied the balloons to a pumpkin for another lucky customer and let the kids be themselves.

Tyler rolled this one off by himself. I don't think he had a plan for it. Confusing.

The 3 older boys here took a lot of time to pick through the pumpkins. Jonathan asked them to find various superlatives ones, like best dressed, tallest, most likely to scare away goblins, etc. (Probably completely different ones, but they were searching!)

Tyler started sorting the baby pumpkins.

Dylan found his perfect pumpkin.

And so did Isaac. We bought them.

I'm so happy that Jonathan was there to give his pumpkin carving advice and assistance. Steven is usually the one to cave the pumpkin with the kids but we usually wait so it'll be fresh for Halloween night. This, on the other hand, is SO much less stressful. We checked carving a jack o lantern off of our list with more than a week to spare! So what that it rotted in a day in the hot weather.

Tyler found all of the toys laying around (and ones in the toy box) and put them into his push truck Darren made.

I had made crock pot chicken for tacos. It wasn't that delicious b/c I hadn't heated the tortillas. (Matt, one of my brothers who served his mission in Mexico told me that NO Mexican EVER eats a cold tortilla.)