Grocery Lane: Menu Monday

Weekend Highlights:

First of all, the best part of the weekend was the cool weather… yay! I loved bundled up babies!

This weekend was a fun one that had us here, there and everywhere!

Saturday started off with a 4 mile run followed by some Halloweeny errands. Since we were headed to a Halloween get together Saturday afternoon at our friends Lynn and Tuller’s house, we had to act quickly and finish our costumes early in the day. We had most of our costume items ready to go Friday night, but there were a few odds and ends that were a must; and luckily we found everything we were looking for. Whew!

The vision for our costumes this year came from Mike. We love the TV show The Office and have always joked that Everett would make a killer Dwight Schrute. Well, the other night when we were throwing around ideas, Mike said, “I got it. I’ll be Jim (Halpert), you can be Pam (Halpert) and Everett will be Dwight.” I almost rolled on the floor laughing…I loved it.

After looking for inspiration online we decided to dress up as Jim and Pam, just like they dressed up on one of the Halloween episodes of The Office. Pam was a cat and Jim was a 3 hole punch. If you watch the show, you can totally appreciate those costumes. We knew dressing E up as Dwight would be hilarious enough on its own.

Luckily we already had most of the pieces and parts of our costumes from our own closet, and what we didn’t have we found easily at Target, Goodwill and Dollar Tree. I was also supposed to have a painted on nose and whiskers,but forgot the face paint at home. Oops.

Everett’s outfit came from Once Upon a Child and with a little tweaking to his shirt, he was a dead ringer for Dwight Schrute. We printed a Dunder Mifflin name badge from Walgreens and sewed it on his shirt and added a great pair of glasses from Dollar Tree (which we still can’t believe he left on his face!).

After a very full day of errand running, playing and dressing up, E was a trooper, but very tired. He made his way around the party for a bit and then headed to bed before the rest of the guests arrived. It’s tough being such a celebrity.

After the little guy went to sleep and the sun went down we enjoyed a beautiful fall night outside with food, friends and football (patio TVs are a must this time of year)!

We feasted on chili (with rice or on hotdogs) and cheese sauce followed by a crackling fire and s’mores!

Deeelish!

Sunday morning started off with our little guy sleeping in – yay! I woke him up at 8:15 just so he wouldn’t be too far off of his normal schedule…he’s usually a 7am kind of guy on the weekends. He apparently partied hard the night before!

After a quick breakfast at Panera, family trip to Publix and a wonderful 2 hour nap (for all of us) we headed out for the afternoon. We were originally planning on celebrating our friends’ daughter’s 2nd birthday, but her Great-Grandmother passed away and the party had to be rescheduled for a later date.

We took advantage of the beautiful weather and headed to the newly opened East End Market in the Audubon Park District of Orlando. Our friend John is the owner and has been working on this amazing local foodie hub for two years now. We are so excited that it is open and LOVED the urban, funky, and organic vibe (so did everyone else – it was packed!).

We met Lynn there for some treats and had a great time exploring all that East End has to offer. I can’t wait to blog about all of the amazing details in this renovated space, but until then I can tell you that E loved it about as much as we did! He had a blast!

Pumpkin Gingerbread Smoothie and Beet and Ginger Juice from Skyebird Juice Bar.

After saying goodbye to Lynn we had one more stop on our mind…pumpkins! We had yet to make it to a pumpkin patch and knew that there was a huge pumpkin patch on our way home.

We stopped by the St. John Lutheran Church Pumpkin Patch and were definitely not disappointed! There were not only tons of pumpkins, but tons of people. There were food trucks, bounce houses and lots of things for the kiddos (I can’t wait to bring E when he can actually participate in the activities!).

Somebody was pretty excited!

Everett liked touching and slapping the pumpkins, but he really loved playing with the grass and hay. He was so interested in the ground and luckily didn’t even try to put it in his mouth. We realized that this was actually his first time actually sitting in the grass and he loved pulling it up and putting dirt all over his pants. Total boy.

Somebody was getting a little sleepy!

Mike picked out our family pumpkin, he had certain attributes he was looking for and I think it weighs more than all three of us put together – it is huge!

Holding that gigantic thing actually kind of reminded me of being pregnant! Yowza!

Kudos to our Chicco stroller – I think we definitely exceeded the weight limit on this one!

As for this week, it seems pretty normal. Mike is back to playing soccer and working overtime along with our normal half marathon training runs. Hopefully the fall weather is here to stay…it makes afternoon runs so much more enjoyable!

We also will be celebrating our third anniversary soon and might have something planned this weekend – since it’s Mike’s year to plan (we switch off every year) I have no idea what is planned (he probably doesn’t yet either Winking smile !)