Halloween festival, well just a plain old good time!

Sage's last minute costume which Sage and I came up with between the two of us

The "hayride" truck, ready to go

Carving pumpkins, I don't have my cute little girl's straw hat on in this picture, but I was dressed up as a country girl, and everyone thought I looked like Anne of Green Gables!

cute dressed up visitors

Kai is a "common rider"(this is really the name, said with Japanese pronunciation, I'd love to know how the name came about!) one of the popular comic heroes, he loves wearing costume outfits like this and swears it makes him go faster than any of us:)

loading up the truck for a ride to the pumpkin patch, although we had picked alot of pumpkins, we left some so people could pick out their own if they liked, the truck hayride was a popular attraction and we gave several rides.

This is the one! Everyone enjoyed the trip to the pumpkin patch, especially the kids of course

Orie, Koko, and Rita

Doing the power pose:)

Kenji was a fisherman, an easy last minute do, Ha!

Carving, all by myself

Toshi with pumpkin...

Cute huh!

After carving pumpkins and eating chicken broth/veggie soup made by Nai-Nai and Kabochan we had a contest, to see who could throw a bag of momi-gara, rice hulls, the farthest, both a kids contest and an adult contest, lots of laughs!

way to go skeleton!

The winners of the adult contest with their veggie prizes

after the contest we invited everyone to the spaghetti squash/kabocha/pumpkin field to help us harvest the rest of our crop. Makino-san(a Monday volunteer!) very helpfully earlier in the day cut them off the vine, so everyone spread out over the field and carried them to the truck. Considering we had between 50 and 60 visitors(at least half were kids), we had plenty of help.The kids were fighting over them, looking all over, it was like an easter egg hunt! Everyone had a great time they said, and it was so fast for us! The kids only lamented they couldn't ride back in the truck since it was packed full of squash..

Here they are in the dusk, bringing 'em in

the harvest!

by this time it was dark and time to hand out homemade cookie favors(thanks to Nai-Nai and Kabochan of course!) to the kiddoes and light the jack-o-lanterns, this is just a fun collage, but they looked really cool in the dark, the kind of thing that turns you back into a delighted kid!

some more jack-o-lanterns...a fun day, and the rain started just as everyone was packing into cars and headed home, hallelujah! they'd been calling for rain all day, whew!