I used to love fall.  It was my favorite time of year growing up but now that I’m allergic to mold, I hate it.  When the leaves fall, then get wet, mold builds up in them and I’m totally miserable.  Oh sure I’m taking allergy shots but it takes a long time for those to ‘cure’ an allergy.  I was told about 3 to 5 years with a 95% cure rate.  Well, we shall see, won’t we?

With fall and Halloween just around the corner, my family and I spent the weekend in the yard planting bulbs for the spring and decorating the yard for the season.  We had a blast.  We stacked up some bails of straw and put some mums on them and pumpkins too.  It’s way too early to carve any of them so we also put out some plastic Jack-o-Lanterns we have that have lights in them.

I had found an old set of pillow cases that were white, took them apart and made 4 ghosts to fly on a wire between some of the trees in our yard.  They came out really good because we used balloons for the heads and that made the rest of the body flow really good in the wind. 

My husband had put a Boston Butt on the grill and had it cooking on low most of the day while we were in the yard.  It smelled heavenly and I think it made of work even harder to get finished so we could have an early dinner or late lunch.  I had sweet potatoes baking in the oven, put on a jar of green beans I had canned over the summer and also had made macaroni salad last night for today.  It’s always better to let it sit so all the different flavors can blend and make it yummy.  I just hope the rice noodles work as well as regular ones since I can’t have wheat now.

Anyway, we recycled a few old things which only helps the environment, added some flowers for next year to make our environment a little brighter and basically had some good clean fun together as a family.  Nothing beats spending time with the ones you love outdoors and then around the table for a meal to top it all off.

My neighbors kids are spoiled absolutely rotten.  They just got one of the neatest wooden swing sets I have ever seen.  Really the kids are great kids and I didn’t mean to imply they weren’t good kids.  If my kids were still small, I would have loved to have gotten them a swing set like the one the neighbors got too.

Well I do have grand babies that visit so I still might check into getting one for my yard after all.  There’s nothing I like better than hearing children laughing.  That’s the sweetest sound there is.

It was one of those mornings that tells you it’s Fall and not Summer anymore.  I love a nice crisp morning but I’m not so sure I’m ready for cold weather.  I was stuck inside way too much this summer so I feel a bit like I missed it.  Oh well, there isn’t a darn thing I can do to stop it from coming so I guess I may as well just pull out the light jacket and smile anyway.

That’s what I love about this community, people actually care about our schools and the children.  There’s a chemical factory about 10 miles from our school and there are always volunteers from there doing something to help not only our school but any of the many schools in our county.

They volunteer to work on the grounds of the schools making them more beautiful, they tutor kids that need extra help and they donate funds to help with the purchase of new technology equipment for our computer labs and also our technology departments.  They deserve a big fat ‘THANK YOU SO MUCH’ from all of us.

Perhaps you could find the time to donate some time to a local school in your area.  You don’t have to be a teacher to help tutor.  You don’t have to be a landscaper to help make the school grounds look better.  You just have to care and be willing to give up a little of your time.  It will mean more than you know.