Middle School Halloweening

I tried to offer up a Halloween Party in lieu of trick-or-treating to my middle schoolers this year. They took me up on the party part, but somehow still schemed their way into trick-or-treating. 

The 7th grade girls dressed in various animal onesies. They were super cute!

Aiden at first didn't want to have his friends over at the same time Bree was, but quickly changed his mind when I told him her could invite the girls that are on his friends text string.  LOL!  First boy / girl party for us!

All in all, I think the night was a success.  Next year I'm going to push a little harder to eliminate the trick-or-treating.  Wish me luck....

 

Movie Night

Bree went to the movies with some girlfriends for the first time since COVID. They went to see The Adam's Family, and are apparently angling to see Clifford next.  

 

Pumpkin Carving

Just under the gun.....

Halloween kitty is very curious what this mess is all about.

 

Spooky

 

Halloween Spirit Day

My old lady and walrus.🎃

 

Still Running....

Today's meet is vs. Chelmsford. Go Bulldogs!

 

XC vs. Curtis Middle School

Aiden's having a great season (when he's not been injured).  2nd place seems to be his sweet spot.

 

Precipice Trail

Sean & Aiden set out in the early morning to climb the Precipice Trail before we pack up camp and head home.  I'd done this harrowing trail with Sean 18 years ago, and was all set with doing it again....

The boys left before sunrise to beat the crowds, but ended up needing to turn around and come back to camp because Sean forgot to wear his hiking boots!  He showed up at the base of the trail in Crocs. 🙈 Luckily, they still managed to find parking on their return trip.

No fear....😳

Sean 18 years ago doing this climb.  Bold, but not quite as bold as Aiden.

Me 18 years ago freaking out about this climb.

At the summit!

Me - 18 years ago, same spot.

 

3 Summits and More

We tackled 3 peaks today!  We set out to hike Day Mountain this morning.  

That hike turned out to be not very long, so we also hiked the nearby Triad Trail.  From there, we realized we were close to Pemetic Mountain, which is the hike we had wanted to do on the first day.  Turns out, this was a fantastic and much less populated way to summit Pemetic.

View from a top Pemetic.

Found ourselves back on the Carriage Trails once we had descended Pemetic Mountain.

We had a little time to kill before our sunset timed entry pass at Cadillac Mountain, so we made a quick trip to Bar Harbor for ice cream and to walk around.

Our original timed entry pass for Cadillac was something like 2:30pm.  We got lucky and were able to swap it for a sunset entry.  The clouds broke just enough for us to get some gorgeous pics.

 

Carriage Roads & Jordan Pond House

We spent today biking on the Carriage Roads.  Jordan Pond House isn't taking reservations these days, and we noticed that the parking lot was packed when we drove by the other day, so.... we decided to park in a lesser known area and earn our popovers with a bike ride.

Our plan was to have popovers sometime after lunch, however, Sean forgot to bring along the two lunches he was responsible for.  We were glad to share the other two lunches, because the wait for a table at Jordan Pond House was insanely long!  I think we waited around 2 hours for a table, which put a little bit of a damper on the day.  But we ended up having a full lunch (and multiple popovers!) which was nice.

Holding my tiny son in the palm of my hand.😅

 

Stunning Sunrise

We weren't able to score a parking pass to catch the sunrise at Cadillac Mountain, but turns out we didn't need to.  Literally a 5 minute walk from our campsite at Blackwoods Campground was the perfect spot to watch the sunrise.  And it wasn't at all crowded.  There were maybe 8 other people watching the sunrise from this vantage point, and there was ample room for everyone to spread out and feel like they had the sunrise to themselves.  Simply gorgeous!

 

Acadia National Park

We finally made it to Acadia!  Boy have things changed here since Sean & I were here last (18 years ago!!)  There are soooo many tourists..... This is not the hike we had set out to do today, but due to lack of places to park at Pemetic Mountain, we had to come up with a Plan B on the spot.  Lucky for us, Dorr Mountain did not disappoint!