American traditions

Halloween is HUGE around here. Basically any kind of holiday, whether religious or other kind is a cause for celebration and in some cases, going overboard. People have ghosts, lights, zombies and other stuff on their front and back yards. There are pumpkins everywhere. Since this is our first Halloween together, at least living together, we decided to do something about our place.

On Saturday we went pumpkin picking with T's co-worker Oscar and his family. We met them at the Demarest Farms in Hillside, NJ, about 20 minutes from our place after driving in circles for few minutes. Our directions were not exactly trustworthy but enough about that. I've met Oscar once before, briefly and this was the first time meeting his family, wife Bernadette and son Jeremy and daughter Elizabeth. They were all really nice and we had fun with them. Jeremy is a braniac destined for big things, even at 11 years old. While T was parking the car Jeremy and Oscar pulled out their list of Finnish things to say and Jeremy said "Hauska tavata" which means nice to meat you. He had a little bit of an accent so I didn't catch it but I thought it was really cute! and nice. Who does that? Other than T's best friend CJ who had the Finnish national anthem as T's ring tone the first time I met her, no one has done anything like that for me!

We started out with lunch, the farm had a salad bar where I got my lunch from and the others had burgers and hot dogs. After checking out the store, we bought our tickets for the hey ride which took us to the pumpkin and apple fields. We roamed around in the field of pumpkins looking for the perfect pumpkin. Since I was not able to carry anything we decided that me and T would be OK with just one. Unlike T's blogs suggests, I did NOT choose a big ass pumpkin...(and besides, even if I did, shouldn't all those hours with Adam help with that problem?!?!) I believe it was T's finding and she carried it around until I found a smaller, more perfect one. :-) I was only thinking about her well being...

After we all chose our pumpkins we thought we would go apple picking. We tried the first few trees but all apples were gone. We so a lone apple in one of the trees and Bernadette decided to climb the tree...she did not come down with an apple though! She almost fell which had her and T hysterical laughing!

We didn't want to go all the way to the end of the farm to get apples so we decided to take the hey ride back and go roam the store one more time. Me and T found this cute cat decor for our pumpkin which was just perfect for us since neither one of us was sure we could carve the pumpkin, so now our pumpkin looks like a cat. T has a picture of it in her blog and I will add one to mine when I have a chance. After the store we had some ice cream and then left to go play WII at their house. Jeremy and T had some intense games going on...T won the Madden NFL football game and it looks like it was a sign of things to come as the Eagles won yesterday their own game! Now if tonight the Giants could lose... We had a great Saturday with them and as soon as my foot gets better, I will kick some as in WII bowling!

Now it's time to head to class...later