My Family's Parade Float

Is your family nuts? Did they decide to enter a family float in the Mentor, KY Christmas parade? Then no, your family is not nuts. But mine did, and is, and that makes them way more fun than your family! :) I have no idea how this got started, or whose idea it was. All I know is I now need to stuff a couple more thousand paper napkins into chicken wire before December 11th, the day of the showdown parade.  Let me start by explaining Mentor, which is mostly why this whole thing is hilarious to me. You can pretty much see from one end of Mentor to the other. If one were ever to call a town "Mayberry" for all the reasons we call towns "Mayberry," this town would be it. Exhibit A: the sign taped to my Granny's front door. 

It says "Knock Loudly or if that fails open door and yell." I'm not making this up.

So we're going to make a float, and go down the one side street in Mentor before turning around and coming back up the main drag. And the theme for our float? "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer", of course! The great-grandchildren are going to be reindeer, my Uncle John, who looks like Santa, will be driving the truck pulling the flatbed as if he's driving the crime scene away. Aunt Cherry will be Mrs. Clause in the sleigh making sure the little reindeer don't catapult themselves over the sides. Granny will be lying against a mailbox (she got run over getting the mail) and the rest of us will be dressed in mourning black following along side the float. Pretty awesome huh? 

I told you Uncle John looks like Santa! And that's my Aunt Cherry of course. 

So now to actually constructing the float. Apparently proper floats have tissue paper stuffed into chicken wire all along the bottom. Tissue paper is super expensive in large quantities, so we went with paper napkins. We all showed up at Granny's at 10am Saturday morning and started working!

Well, mostly we stood around for awhile and looked at it...

But after cousin Joe arrived work began in earnest while they made railings for the sides of the float. 

Cousin Mike--all about safety first!

So things were moving along just fine while we waited for Mom to arrive with all the napkins UNTIL.... an infiltrator drove by!! See my family is trying to keep this a secret from the other 10 people in Mentor. It's very serious business. And SUE (apparently she is our biggest competition) drove by Granny's and slowed down and waved real big as if to say "Oh what's going on here? I'm just waving to be friendly but my laser eyes are taking in everything you're doing in there!" That's when the tarp went up. 

So now that we were protected from infiltrators and Mom had arrived with the napkins, it was time to figure out how exactly we were going to make this happen. 

At some point it was decided that 10 napkins per hole was the magic number. 

Meanwhile, I was helping Granny get lunch ready--homemade cheese coneys!

Yum

That's my Granny! :) Making sweet tea, of course.  

So after a fun-filled day and hard work, we really got almost 50% of the napkin part of the float completed. I was so impressed. And it looks like a real parade float!!

Beginning of the day--I'm thinking there's no way we're going to get this thing done. 

But a couple hours later--holy cow it's a parade float!!!

So stay tuned to the next installment of our float progress. We'll be working on it again very soon! 


Click here to read Part 2!

Eating Pumpkins

Phineas LOVES his baby pumpkin! He tries to eat the stem all the time.

How hilarious is that face!??!

Viv does NOT like to be left out of the fun. 

Pumpkin Patch

There have been a lot of photos circulating in the blog/online world lately and now I get to add my own. I don't remember the last time I went to pick out pumpkins, and I must say, it's a fairly anti-climactic adventure. Especially when you don't actually go out in the field to snag one, but rather point at one that's already been picked and then have your husband pick it up and cart it away. 

My big strong man holding the ridiculously heavy pumpkins. :)

The original plan was to head to the nature center to get a family photo for Mary and Brad. And some pictures of where they had their wedding with the fall colors. But that didn't quite work out. So we tried some family photos in the midst of kid/pumpkin craziness. Lovely results Gaertners! 

Beautiful family.

We decided Garfunkle needed some artistic shots in the pumpkins. He gamely put on his modeling face.

And what was perhaps my most favorite part of pumpkins....the baby pumpkins!!! It doesn't get any cuter than a big pile of baby pumpkins with gigantic stems. We got one for Finny and one for Vivy. Finny has been gnawing on the stems since we brought them home. 

I'm 100% positive it doesn't get any cuter than this. 

And finally, we went back to Mary and Brads and ordered some pizza and made some spiked apple cider. It was AMAZING. I made a spiced butter that we put into the simmering cider and stirred until it melted. Add a little rum and you're good to go. We drank our dessert for sure. The cider was so thick and rich. Absolutely delicious. After work today I made another stick of spiced butter and put it on a slice of warm homemade bread. WOW is all I can say. Here's a photo of one of my favorite baking ingredient combinations: butter and brown sugar. 

We ended up eating quite a bit of the spiced butter before it actually went into the cider. So good. 

Brian and I are really terrible at documenting our lives together. Maybe I'll make that a New Years Resolution this year or something. We did get several photos together that turned out surprisingly well (with our carefully chosen pumpkins of course). Tomorrow is Wednesday when I'm supposed to post, but MAN do I have a ton of cards to make (like....60...) so I'll probably be sharing more of life again on Friday.