Hart Happenings

  Trunk or treat, scouting for food, and beautiful weather made for quite an eventful week.  I feel like we are getting the fall that we've missed so far.  Hooray!
  Ian has been taking care of our neighbor's little 5 acre farm while they are visiting family in New York so we have been getting all kinds of ideas from there.  She is an excellent gardener and they have the best rope swing I have ever seen!  Now if we could only find a tree around here......
  We did a spur of the moment refresh of Peter and Jack's bedroom yesterday.  I walked in there and was afraid for my life, but a couple of bins, lamps and nightstands later and all is well.
   Great Brains have started again and this week we enjoyed hearing about Australia, the man who invented Legos, badgers, the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton, balloon animals, and bicycles. I always learn a ton at these evenings and am always so impressed by our kids and the others.
  It's weird to think that at this time last year we were waiting with baited breath to see if our loan and everything would go through to buy this house.  Looking back on the last almost year, it is really profound to see how the Lord has guided our path and all the things that have happened.  We are really feeling at home here and marvel at the blessings that are ours.
  So, these are the weeks of the leaves here.  The boys have had some epic leaf battles and we have raked and blown and mowed the leaves.  Our friends the Martins came over on Saturday and hauled away 56 big black garbage bags of leaves, which sounds like a lot, but looks like so little considering how much we have left!  I think they got those 56 bags from 4 big piles we had raked up.  There were probably 30+ piles like that scattered all over our yard.  Thank goodness for the lawn mower!
  Ruth and I took the kids to the NASA space exhibit at the museum on Wednesday which was a big hit.  Jack and Emerson were the only ones brave enough to ride the exercise machine they had that the astronauts worked out on.  We got to see how much we would weigh on the moon and Mars, see and touch some meteorites, tour the inside of a space shuttle, design a Mars community, pack for an excursion into space, and see the heat patterns in our bodies with the heat detector thingy.  They had so much stuff to see and experiment with and we had a blast!
  We are counting down the days until Thanksgiving.  Can't wait to be with you all.  I will be bringing an apple slab pie and some cranberry sauce and maybe some other stuff.  We'll see what happens.