Tale of Five Forks: Girls Weekend Plus Luke

When Brian headed out of town for a bachelor party, we were excited for Mimi, Baba and Alli to come into town for some girl-time, Fall-time fun!

We started things off with Addie (in her newly delivered Black Cat costume) and Baba deep in conversation on the front porch. I looked out the front door and saw this sweet scene. I love the bond between these two. They were out waiting for Mom and Collins to get home from school, and I heard them talking about car washes among other things. :)

Luke in his newly delivered bat costume....he didn't even try to take the ears off!

Saturday morning, Baba made the girls' day by giving them each $10 to spend on whatever they wanted at Target. Addie zeroed in on a Doc McStuffins doll pretty quickly, and I convinced Collins she really needed a Lite Brite in her life! And Luke pushed the cart for us ladies...

Just as I suspected, Collins loved the Lite Brite and could not stop making neat designs all weekend. I remember Lite Brite from the St. Stephens church nursery- so that tells you how old it is!

I watched not one, not two, but THREE movies over the course of the weekend! This never happens, but it was so relaxing. The weather did not cooperate at all (not Fall-like at all but hot and muggy instead) so it was so fun to stay inside and watch movies and munch on this "monster mix".

And yes, of course, this was one of the movies we watched! We even let the girls watch it this year; Addie didn't love it, but Collins did and has already asked if we can watch it again before Halloween.

Baba turned 84 on October 2nd so we were excited to celebrate her birthday while she was here. Alli cooked country style steak, Collins made her a potholder, and Baba prepared her own birthday pies! We had a great celebration.

Why have one pie when you can have two? We had sweet potato and pumpkin which was a special treat.

When Sunday came around, we were excited to head to the pumpkin patch. Unfortunately, this is when things went very awry. As we were headed up Glenwood Avenue, the Suburban started sputtering and jerking, and I knew we were in trouble. We had run out of gas. What an idiot I am. I knew we were low, but I didn't realize we were that low. NOT GOOD. Brian was out of town at a bachelor party, and we were out of luck. Alli hiked it up to the Sheetz up the hill, but they didn't have any gas cans. We called Roadside Assistance and they said they'd head over, but it would be 40 minutes.

The kids were getting hot and restless, when all of a sudden a police officer and a white truck pulled up behind us. The white truck had a front Tar Heel vanity plate. "The Tar Heel angels are here to save us!" I cried. Sure enough, these people had seen us across Glenwood Avenue and asked if we needed help. I had told them that Roadside Assistance was coming, and that we were okay. But they had seen the car seats in the back of the car and turned around to go home and get their gas can anyway. They came back to fill up our tank! I was touched by their kindness. After getting some gas in the tank and checking on the battery, we were good to go.

I felt terrible for getting us into that situation, and as Baba reminded me- "Brooke, never let that gas tank get below a quarter of a tank!" But I was so impressed by the way my kids handled the situation and was so grateful to that nice couple who saved us.

We never made it to the pumpkin patch, but we did make it to Guasaca where we all enjoyed a delicious lunch (especially Luke).

The girls were disappointed that we didn't make it to the pumpkin patch so I had to make it up to them. I came up with the idea that we should have a pumpkin painting party. So we went up to Highland (who had just put their pumpkins out earlier that day) and all picked out a small pumpkin.