appuhs!

i know it's kinda city slickers, but when our neighbor friends invited us to caravan out to a u-pick apple farm in yucaipa, i jumped at the chance. true to my so cal roots, i have a love of the fall season incommensurate with experience.

i'd been talking up the trip all week, so violet was excited to go to the appuh fahm with her friend viv. violet was especially thrilled when the "big girls" (viv's sister stella and her pal phoebe) wanted to ride in our car. violet turned an episode of diego on her kindle, and the preteens squealed. as it turns out, the kid who is the current voice of diego is a member of their middle-school cafeteria posse. OMG! if only violet could understand there's only one degree of separation between her and her first celebrity crush! oh the hours i would while away, dreaming of meeting mikey from goonies, how he would be my date to my first school dance, how we would kiss with our lips closed so that our braces wouldn't get stuck together. the other night kevin actually used the words "looks like sean astin" to call someone ugly! i gave him a one-way ticket up troy's bucket.

back on the trail

violet thoughtfully considered which apples she wanted to bring home, take one bite of, and regurgitate into my hand.

as a book in our daily rotation says, "no biting our friends! what do we bite?"

does this look like a child who prefers the taste of human flesh? at least i know which side of the family she gets her carnivorous bent from.

once we'd collected our bounty, we headed to a general store where the apples cost less per pound than the ones we'd just hauled down the dusty trail (and by "we" i mean kevin).

violet's favorite things were taste-testing the fresh-pressed ciders - "i yike goose now" says the juice snob - and sprinting up and down the aisles of glass collectibles. she also really liked this hat, but we ain't moving to echo park, kid.

since i know how much kevin loves to sacrifice his sunday mornings during football season - almost as much as viv's dad paddy - i'm pretty sure we'll be making this an annual tradition. cheese!

mraow mraow!

as you know, violet is quite possibly the World's Biggest Baby Jaguar Fan, so when i showed her a few costume options on amazon, i knew it was like offering her a dinner choice of "salad, worms or pasta." sure, amazon billed this "jaguar" costume as a leopard, but who knows the difference? well, i'm sure the almighty diego knows the difference. as violet recently told her talking purple puppy doll, who is also named violet: "hey! vi-yet! my name is vi-yet and i wahn watch diego ALL THE TIME!" that's just one example of what i find to be her totally endearing and hilarious habit of shouting out random bits of information to various people/characters/inanimate objects, especially when said person/character/item is nowhere in sight. this kid has about a dozen imaginary friends already. another example, from our commute home yesterday: "hey! gak-o-yantern! i dohn yike witches! i dohn yike skulls! rudy has skulls on his doggy coyyar!" and after a dinner out the other night, she went up to this random little girl and started sharing her life story: "hi little girl! i have two dogs (holding up five fingers), rudy and petey. they go pee pee ow-side, little girl. i'm a big girl. i'm not a baby anymore. i'm two now (holding up five fingers)."

we were so happy with how this costume worked out. the whiskers divided by the pouncing and the "mraow mraow!"-ing equals a pretty high cute quotient, right?

violet picked elmo for this year's jack-o-lantern, and we did an owl craft. here's our humble stoop:

we took violet trick-or-treating around the neighborhood, and she LOVED it. even though we'd been talking it up, i wasn't really sure how she'd react to the strangers ("neighbors"), but she wasn't shy at all. we'd walk her most of the way up a walkway, but she'd go the rest of the way on her own, knock, say "trick or treat" to the grown-ups and eagerly plunge her hand into the proffered bowl. nana would have been appalled; she taught us proper manners involving holding out your bucket and waiting for the candy to be dropped in. sorry, nana.

as soon as she'd get the candy, violet would turn heel and exclaim, "i wahn go to the NEXT HOUSE!" we'd halt her and prompt a "thank you" - which she still pronounces as "shoo"- but since pretty much everyone was laughing, i'd say the snatch-and-grab was met with incontrovertibly positive reinforcement. violet's jaguar-hunting (for candy) instincts were so strong, in fact, that only a few scary decorations stopped her in her tracks - witches, of course, and those thunder/lightning trip sensors. even the smoke machine at one neighbor's awesome house didn't deter her once we'd promised it was "not hot."

violet hadn't eaten a piece of candy since easter, but she's obviously learned that candy is awesome because she'd been asking for kit kat and reese's all week. after dinner, we indulged and watched it's the great pumpkin, charlie brown on the couch together. we rewound "blagh! agh! poisoned dog lips!" about twenty times. even a week later, violet is still talking about how lucy kisses snoopy: "that part is very funny." if left to her own devices, this would be her life: