Why I Oughta...

Over the weekend we went up to the Highwood Pumpkin Festival and came face-to-face with this massive wall of carved pumpkins.  It was pretty neat to see them all stacked up on the scaffolding around the downtown.  We even contributed two carved masterpieces to the collection in the hopes of breaking the Guinness World Record , but I'm not sure that they got there this year. The festival is just seven years young, but they're doing a lot of great things to bring their community together and raise money for a cause.  I'm not sure how Nat found out about the fest, but I'm glad we went.  Oh...and we made a stop our way home, just because we were in that neck of the woods.  But, that's for another post on another day.

We found ourselves in Downtown Downers Grove today and scattered across Main Street were a bunch of ice sculptures.   Over on Chicago Parent Magazine, they have a listing for the event that spans both Saturday and Sunday.  It was cold this weekend and that was GREAT for this things. This 'snowflake' one was outside of Ballydoyle's on the south side of the tracks. Frankfort does this and I think it is a nice way to add some flair to the shopping district during the cold, dreary post-Christmas months.  We missed the demo, but I bet the kids would have loved seeing that in all of it's chainsaw-shaving-glory.

Over the weekend, we went up to Michigan and were able to attend the annual Glad Peach Festival in town.  They had all the necessary elements to have a great fest:  a good theme (Peaches and Gladiolas!), a small town atmosphere, some fun events, and great weather. We even saw the crowning of Miss Coloma 2013!  The Babe loved that. I know A LOT of hard work goes into the production of the festival, but what is a fun time, could be an amazing festival, I think.  Start with upping the number and variety of peaches.  Where's the peaches?  And the gladiolas?  That's a start, I'd think.